iOS 26 Developer Beta 5
Apple today provided developers with the fifth betas of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 for testing purposes, with the updates coming a week after Apple seeded the fourth betas.
Apple is continuing to refine button placement, animations, and design in preparation for launching iOS 26 in September.
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Apple added a toggle in the Camera app to allow users to toggle on Classic Mode, a setting that reverses the scroll direction when you swap from mode to mode.
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There is now a dedicated Select button in the Mail app, instead of the button being tucked away inside of the “…” menu.
Another subtle change to the tab bar’s implementation in this beta is that the glass lens actually renders a duplicate copy of the tab items. You can see here both magnified items are shown with the selected blue tint, but the actual items are unselected.
Beta 5 feels a lot better put-together than previous betas, design wise. There have been a lot of subtle changes to how Liquid Glass works to maintain the effect but reduce the pain points. I think it’s going to ship like this.
Opening a menu reloads the whole SwiftUI Table and drops the selection…
Why does everything bounce and have weird lighting effects? Why are all the controls so big? Why is the thing above the keyboard sometimes a search field and other times a regular text field?
Previously:
Update (2025-08-08): Benjamin Mayo:
What is even crazier is, in beta 5, there is a new setting for the Camera app called “Classic Mode Switching”. The sole purpose of this toggle is to reverse the scroll direction. That is, to make it again work like every other app. The fact this setting exists at all is wild to me, and even more so that the default is for that toggle to be off, suggesting that having the Camera app defy the fundamental logic of the iPhone’s direct manipulation user interface is the preferred path forward.
In iOS 26, currently in beta, creating a new task for Apple’s Reminders app is now a much faster process, thanks to the introduction of a “New Reminder” control that lets you create tasks without ever opening the app.
I’m kind of enjoying the seizure-inducing toolbar redraws when you launch most of Apple’s apps on iOS beta 5.
And the Foundation Model streaming APIs changed in crashy ways somehow in beta 5 and I can’t find anything in the release notes about it. Yea! So late for basic APIs to still be changing.
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I like a lot of the functional changes they've made in iOS 26, but the visuals completely suck.
Information density is gone too.
Is my phone now a Fisher Price device for 4-year-olds?
Too many rounded corners. Some of them, like the home screen dock, don't even line up consistently with the surrounding hardware edges even though this seems to be the whole point of this trash.
It's completely nonsensical that they are making the rounded corners on everything so huge. Having huge corners on such small screens looks unbalanced. The corner radii should be 1/4th as big. The Settings app in particular looks comical.
Tim Cook has no taste if he let this garbage out into the wild.
It’s as though no one at Apple grasps that the GREATEST BENEFIT of ‘augmented’ and ‘virtual’ ‘realities’ is not having to be held back by the limitations of the physics of The Real. The stupid ‘glass’ curvature effect is a bug in reality, not a feature… and for a company that prides itself so much on not dwelling on nostalgia, they sure seem hung up on re-introducing the aberrations that lenscrafters have toiled on getting RID OF for millennia. So dumb. What next? Gravity? UI controls that aren’t Accessible, because “physics”?? Dumb… dumb… dumb…
DOESN’T ANYONE NOTICE THIS??!? I FEEL LIKE I’M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!
