iOS 26 Developer Beta 8
Apple today provided developers with the eighth betas of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 for testing purposes, with the updates coming a week after Apple seeded the seventh betas.
The release notes don’t call out any changes since beta 5.
Historically, since iOS 13, beta 8 has been the last beta of the summer cycle before the release candidate builds. That suggests that today’s seed is as good as it gets before release — this is it, folks, this is iOS 26.
Previously:
Update (2025-08-26): Steve Troughton-Smith:
From a user standpoint, iOS 26 is fiiine. As a developer, though, this thing is shipping pretty broken. I feel like Apple has done the bare minimum to ensure that their own apps can get out the door and support their marketing, and tread water with the long tail of apps from the App Store that barely go beyond simple layouts and controls, but there are major framework crashers and SpringBoard killers lurking in the weeds. You can bring SpringBoard down with just the Music app, for example.
Sometimes when opening a Safari View Controller on iPadOS 26, its toolbar covers the status bar.
Update (2025-09-02): Marco Arment:
Beta 8 somehow broke
.navigationTransitioneven more 🤣Looking forward to when I can actually use all of what they showed off about Liquid Glass.
I feel like even the nav bar buttons in CarPlay command way too much attention. They look out of place.
At least in the current beta, taking a screenshot on your iPhone won’t include CarPlay’s screenshot anymore — hence a picture.
What’s the point of having accent colors to highlight selections? They’ll just get washed out anyway by media heavy apps like Music because all of the content shining through the UI competes with the accent color.
You don’t need to read anything. All good. Humans are resilient. They’ll figure it out.
It’s okay to have smudged text behind labels. It’s okay to not see pagination labeling or glyphs for buttons. You’ll see it eventually.
Upgraded to iOS 26 beta 8 this morning. App Library search didn’t work. App banners in Safari glitch into the tab bar. In the window behind, the background in Mail app’s sidebar keeps flickering.
Home is the iOS 26 app icon champion. So clean.
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Judging by how buggy 26 is, and nothing is improving, there are more than likely very little changes indeed since beta 5. What a buggy mess. Everyone keeps bringing up iOS 7 beta and the 7.0 release, but that one was at least technically rock solid and only had design issues. Whereas this mess will not be solid even in 3026.
@Léo of course, because they'll stop developing it in late 2027 and leave it buggy to move on to iOS 27.
They seem to just be ok with their software being kind of a buggy mess for long periods now.
