appleOS 26 Public Betas
Apple is allowing members of its public beta testing program to download and install iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 starting today. You can sign up for the public betas on Apple’s beta website. The first public beta features the same content as the fourth developer beta that came out earlier this week, though there is a new fourth beta available for developers as well.
Previously:
- macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 4
- iOS 26 Developer Beta 4
- iPadOS 26 Developer Beta 3
- Assorted Notes on Liquid Glass
- macOS 15 Sequoia Public Beta
Update (2025-07-25): See also: TidBITS, ArsTechnica, Slashdot, Nick Heer.
As a user, the Public Beta builds are mostly fine. Very livable.
As a developer, these builds are a train wreck, and beta 5 can’t come soon enough
Previously:
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I do wonder how many takers they will get to run this stuff. I have a hard time imagining anyone actually wanting to run anything with Liquid Glass.
@gildarts
> I do wonder how many takers they will get to run this stuff. I have a hard time imagining anyone actually wanting to run anything with Liquid Glass.
They will get a lot of takers. They were able to sell a watch that does not show the time to millions. So being able to clearly see contents is not the top priority of all Apple's users.
"They were able to sell a watch that does not show the time to millions”
[Jesse_what_the_hell_are_you_talking_about.gif]
Reading Jason’s review of the public betas left me with the distinct impression that he woke up and chose violence.
I think the worst part of the new interface isn't the Glass design, but the move to make every interface element on the screen ridiculously curved at the corners and/or pill shaped. A small corner curve is nice because right angles look weird too. But the curves in iOS 26 are way too big and look especially weird when there is text inside the element... like very unbalanced. Curves are all over the place in this thing. Why did they decide that squarish elements don't belong on a rectangular screen? Bizarre.
There's also an infuriating amount of transparency. Why do I need to see the home screen icons when I'm using Control Center? Why do I need to see chat bubbles underneath a contact's info screen in Messages? It adds nothing of value while making the content hard to read and distracting.
Turning off Transparency in Accessibility helps, but it also makes the top and bottom of the screen look like ass with a weird toolbar effect that seems poorly designed (hard to describe, but try it and you'll see). And it doesn't turn off transparency fully everywhere (I'm only looking at OS and Apple apps). Where it does turn it off, all you get is a boring medium gray background.
I wish there was a way to adjust the transparency effect. I'd be a lot happier if I could turn it down from 50% to 10% or 5%.
