iOS 26 Developer Beta 9
Apple today provided developers with the ninth betas of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 for testing purposes, with the updates coming a week after Apple seeded the eighth betas.
The release notes don’t call out any changes since beta 5.
Not everything needs to have round end caps 🙄 look how close the album artwork now is to the edges. But move it in any closer, now the labels become useless. Concentricity is total bs.
Why are these designers creating more problems for themselves and us with dumb things like concentricity — which is something literally no one asked for.
Verifiably been sounding the alarm for a month on effects bugs with OS 26 and Icon Composer. No fixes. They’re gonna ship it.
I don’t see progress on any bugs of mine in beta 9, so I think it’s time to wait for 26.1. I suspect the things they are fixing are to support their apps and new iPhones only, and it has been like that for a while now
Just to be sure, I re-checked everything I’ve filed since June. Even the SpringBoard crashers are still unresolved 😶
Beta 9 and
UINavigationBar’sbackButtonItemstill doesn’t respect-hidesSharedBackgroundor-sharesBackground.:(
Effectively means you’re SOL if you do any custom back button designs and don’t want a glass background (or you end up doing weird workarounds with
leftBarButtonItems)
I have never had a problem sending photos to contacts over iMessage until I upgraded to iOS 26, which is a cool indication of where we’re at in early September.
Given that we make an app that frames screenshots, I would very much like it if Apple fixes the bugs in iOS 26 where sometimes the system screenshot UI just doesn’t show.
iOS fails to render icons as they are displayed in Icon Composer when using blend mode Screen on a layer.
This is bad. You cannot know for certain if what you put into your icon looks exactly like what you ship. This is even worse for designers who are not developers and have no idea why this happens. They should not have to think about this stuff.
I am not surprised. I am disappointed.
Icons made in Icon Composer do not render identically on home screens as they do in Icon Composer. This is a complication that never existed for my job before, where I deliver an icon to a client, and the deliverable is broken through no fault of my own. A bug. I’m an icon designer, not a developer. For the first time, I have to deal with bugs.
So on iPad at least, it seems like everybody’s keyboard is broken in 26. Remember to take your iPad back to the Apple Store to the keyboard repaired.
iOS 26 call screening is incredibly good. I had my phone muted for unknown calls the last few years thanks to all those data leaks from various big Aussie companies, that had lead to tons of spam calls.
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This release is profoundly embarrassing for Apple. They had a chance to change direction and make iOS better, instead we get an OS that looks like it was designed by college interns in 2002.
The "make it rounded everywhere" just looks stupid in 80% of the ways they've decided to shoe-horn it into the OS.
Out of all the execs who have been at Apple for 20+ years, nobody is willing to say that this looks like hot garbage?
I remember when Apple used to respond to bug reports from regular end-users like me (not that they ever actually fixed the bugs -- that hasn't changed). Now they don't even respond to well-known developers?
I've stuck with Apple for 35 years, through all of its challenges, but they really do seem like a company in decline now -- at least when it comes to software. The hardware is amazing but the software is becoming pathetic.
I'm due for a phone upgrade this year, but am leaning toward just buying a year-old 16 instead of a brand-new 17, and it's all thanks to Alan Dye.
Of course, it's not just Apple.
Outlook is terrible now, and totally inconsistent between Mac and Windows versions. The Mac version won't even let you create *plain text* emails anymore. It's like Microsoft forgot how to do email. Lots of weird Outlook-specific functions, yet it can't do basic things that Eudora could do 30 years ago.
Acrobat Pro is also completely awful. Looks designed by amateurs who don't ever actually use the product. On the Mac version the toolbar is on the left, and the bookmarks and pages are on the right. But on the Windows version, this is reversed. Why? Who knows. I'm certain on both versions the bookmarks and pages were always on the left side until a year or two ago?
How do these huge companies keep moving forward and not fixing their software, when they have thousands of software engineers and billions of dollars to spend? Why can't they make it work the same way on Windows and Mac? Why do they keep removing basic features, like the ability to create a plain text email? It's baffling.
