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.
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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?
