iOS 26 Developer Beta 4
Apple today provided developers with the fourth betas of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 for testing purposes, with the updates coming two weeks after Apple seeded the third betas.
I don’t see any beta 4 release notes yet.
Apple has re-enabled Apple Intelligence Notification Summaries for apps in the News and Entertainment categories.
[…]
Apple says that it has improved notification summaries in iOS 26 , addressing issues that could cause confusion with news headlines.
With the fourth beta of iOS 26, Apple has again made changes to the Liquid Glass design that’s available across the operating system, tweaking how the menus and buttons appear in apps.
The glassy scrubber in the Weather app is a disaster of a UI element
legibility is so back 🙃
🙃
Pocket Casts for iOS 18 on the left, Apple Podcasts for iOS 26 on the right.
Between the illegible glass and the tab bar that disappears on scroll, I honestly have no idea who can take a look at this and say “Yes, that’ll do it. That’s good.”
Liquid Glass is a mess so far, especially on iOS. Actually pushing me to use apps without Liquid Glass.
Thing is, there is no point along the slider between 0 and 100% opacity where Liquid Glass is ‘fixed’. If you’re a developer, you can try this in code. You either have Liquid Glass, with all its issues, or you have an opaque bar — there’s just no leeway for this lensing/blur effect
Previously:
Update (2025-07-23): Marco Arment:
I just don’t see how they could’ve lived with the beta-3 design tweaks, which radically improved legibility from b1–2 and made the design far more usable, and thought, “Nah, let’s undo that.”
Nobody is talking about their A.I. anymore.
Apparently there are architectural changes to help with reliability, but the only way to know for certain if a generated summary is accurate is to read the original.
“Verify information” indeed, Apple…
There are also new features, including the return of Apple Intelligence Notification Summaries for news. This beta is of particular interest because it’s likely the beta that public beta testers will get in the not too distant future.
The absolute best thing they could do in their situation is to decide, right now, to ship the iPhones 17 with iOS 18.
iOS 26 is still so rough, and so buggy, that it’s not going to make its ship date without massive quality and design sacrifices.
If the iPhones only support 26, either they’re getting delayed (tanking the financials) or they’re shipping with buggy software and a controversial, half-baked design (a PR nightmare).
I’ve never seen Apple struggle so much during a beta release cycle. They have no idea what they’re doing, and they’re letting everyone in on that. It’s not a very reassuring look.
I previously thought Apple couldn’t possibly ship without Liquid Glass for ego reasons alone, but I’m starting to wonder if they just might revert, because it—quite predictably—shows no signs of improvement.
Thread of how websites look in Safari on iOS 26 😐
I know there’s still a month or so of work to go, but right now I’m really struggling. These text labels matter; why are they so hard to read?
OMG iPadOS 26 beta 4 wrecked the StopTheMadness Pro extension popup window!
Also the new camera mode picker is a disaster… Did anyone in HI even care at this point???
Look at the 3 Liquid Glass buttons at the bottom of the image.
Can’t see them? Can’t read them? Yeah, that’s a problem. 😑
Jeff:
The same thing happens for me in the Mail app. While in Dark Mode, the new Search bar at the bottom switches to REALLY bright mode and turns the Delete/Move icons into mysterious white orbs.
Been using it for a few minutes in the simulator and the glass in iOS 26 beta 4 already seems like a bit of a disaster which is saying a lot because it wasn’t without problems in beta 3.
Let’s be clear (LOL): At no point since the announcement of iOS 26’s Liquid Glass did it ever “look good”. It’s certainly a marvel of engineering and technically impressive but just because something has cool refractions, reflections etc doesn’t make it desirable or useable.
So Apple is actually dialing forward the level on insanity on liquid glass rather than back, and things are less readable again.
There’s a Google event in a month, so…
We have about six weeks to go until new iPhones have traditionally been revealed in September, and honestly right now I don’t see how they can land this plane.
To be completely honest with y’all, I’m feeling the same sense of dread about iOS 26 as I did with Stage Manager in iPadOS 16. And it’s actually even worse, because design touches everything across platforms.
The more time passes, the more I feel like the entire idea of Liquid Glass needs to be scrapped. The material is bad; the few structural ideas they had are functionally worse than before.
As always, everyone says “it’s a beta it won’t ship like this”… and it does.
Update (2025-07-25): Dan Moren:
It’s also worth noting that, with very few exceptions, all of the iOS 26 features that Apple demoed during its WWDC keynote this year are available, right now, in the public beta. The exceptions include the digital ID feature in Wallet that uses info from your passport and the age rating/content restriction updates in the App Store.
[…]
Controls now overlay content rather than sitting in designated toolbars or areas of the screen reserved for those controls, and are rendered in transparent glass that refracts and distorts the colors of whatever passes behind it. That’s impressive but also, at times, distracting: sometimes you see a distortion of text from what you’re reading within the UI, which is odd. Or, when scrolling past content that goes abruptly from light to dark, the buttons might similarly flip appearance from, say, black icons to white icons in a way that can feel jarring.
[…]
Safari’s reduced interface hides its commands in a plethora of pop-up menus, which leads to some oddities like two Share buttons.
[…]
Even in what seems like a modest update, there’s way more in iOS 26 than I can go through here.
I think Apple made a change to
UIDesignRequiresCompatibilitythat now reports the OS version as iOS 26, instead of iOS 19, so you might have to update all your codepaths if you were relying on that behavior.This also tells me that Apple fully expects a lot of developers to opt-out of Liquid Glass come September, and it may no longer be ‘just’ a compatibility mode 😅
Quick, which one of these Safari tabs in iOS 26 is the selected one?
I think Apple’s in trouble here.
Just read the commit message to see how well Liquid Glass is going.
So, in OS 26 first-party apps, the “Done” button in navigation/toolbars no longer spells out “Done” but instead shows a checkmark and it is inside a circle of the app’s accent color.
I can’t get used to this being the “Done” button anymore. A checkmark feels like it has been historically more of an indication that some long running process has completed. It doesn’t feel right as a button for me to accept changes and complete my task.
See also: MacRumors.
Previously:
Update (2025-07-28): Benjamin Mayo:
I’ve had a response to one of my OS 26 submitted Feedbacks! I reported that the use of the Music’s app red tint colour in alert dialogs was confusing when the dialog included destructive actions. The design has been changed to resolve the ambiguity.
I’m finding it difficult to stay motivated to work on Apple OS 26 updates (and a new app for iOS 26) because Liquid Glass feels like such a disaster and I’m not excited about it.
Like, should I spend time making sure my apps’ controls are legible? Or just hope Apple fixes their shitty design?
Liquid Glass on one of my standard wallpapers with and without transparency. Hard to claim that the transparent version is better in any sense (and those corners are still too rounded imo).
As a ‘mini’ user, I noticed iOS 26 seems to waste a lot of space.
I have a ~8-inch infotainment screen in my car. Ever since beta 2, iOS 26 CarPlay only shows one widget. The screen definitely has space for more - it actually had two slots on beta 1!
Update (2025-08-01): Benjamin Mayo:
In this post, we share a side-by-side of the iOS 26 app icon and its iOS 18 counterpart, so you can decide for yourself how much of a step forward the new visual style represents.
I don’t want to seem like I’m nitpicking too much, but the “Hold This Call?” UI needs another pass.
The small “Hold” button is nearly touching the needlessly tiny dismiss (✕) button, which only seems about 24pt wide.
This will be error-prone for lots of people in practice. Opposite actions should not be represented by tiny, immediately neighboring touch targets.
I know it’s a small thing, but it’s the kind of thing that has me worried that institutional UI talent is drained or marginalized.
The more I see of iOS 26 and the other upcoming operating systems, the more I question Apple’s current ability in basic design fundamentals. This screen, like illegible text, displays a failure to understand foundational design for touchscreens.
It’s been a year since Apple provided capability for dark mode app icons, and they never provided a way to specify a dark mode version of an “apple-touch-icon”.
Without ever having defined it, and now without providing a way to specify a .icon file in the HTML <head>, This is just going to make every web app icon into an automatically-generated Liquid Glass app icon.
Do they know? Do they not know?
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I, for one, am glad they're not letting the peanut gallery change how they roll out the new design. If it really doesn't work for people, they'll find out with actual data, not just a few posts on X.com.
The peanut gallery highlights critical errors. I'm thankful they're doing it.
The bad part is I can't recall when has Apple reversed course because of them. Maybe the original Sweet Solution?
In about 6 weeks this gets flashed onto new iPhones. It has not changed substantially in the last 6 weeks.
Outside of a revert (a public admission of failure, something Apple is incapable of), I'd guess this is it.
The peanut gallery (which is full of prominent names in Apple development and commentary but sure, the “peanut gallery!”) seems to have a better grasp on what makes a computer useful than the wish.com Ryan Reynolds who is running this debacle.
Low contrast! This surely fails many, many accessibility guidelines.
C’mon, how about a contrast glow or drop shadow behind the button text?
If text is floating on the surface of a glass bubble, it would make sense for it to have a shadow, and that shadow would make the text more legible in this case.
I now firmly believe the launch of liquid glass and Apple intelligens were done for the same reasons
"Push it, people are laughing at us!"
First for lack of AI, then for their take on AI. So what will be rushed in an attempt to save face over liquid glass?
BTW, they're just doing a binary search/overton-window shifting for a transparency percentage with fewer complaints from the glass-lovers and the legibility-lovers.
Round 1: 0% -- illegible!
Round 2: 50% -- it's legible! so un-glassy!
Round 3: 25%
It's so painfully obvious that no one at Apple is actually in charge of design anymore. There is no one who actually USES their betas. They seem to just "design" the look and make sure it compiles and push it out.
There's no one with any taste to actually use it and any authority to go to whoever is supposed to be in charge and say "I can't even fucking read this."
Jony Ive was criticized for prioritizing form over function in his designs. This led to beautiful designs, in marketing shots and on the users devices, that were just not great to use.
Alan Dye is designing for marketing material only. Now the designs only look great in marketing shots, not on the users device. And now even simple usability and accessibility principles, like ensuring text has good contrast to be readable, are being ignored.
One thing I learned relatively early in my career as a web developer is that for many graphic designers, their primary objective is to impress themselves and other graphic designers. Meeting the user's needs is either a lower priority or, for some designers, actually an anathema.
