ios 26 is officially here yeah that name is actually it it looks like most of the rumors were true and this is one of if not the biggest iOS upgrades we have ever seen really since the glory days of Sir Johnny IV back with iOS 7 in 2013 let me break down everything you need to know from this WWDC major announcement the good stuff the bad stuff the new features and also you can get this new version of iOS on your iPhone right now and you can do it totally for free though there are some risks involved let me tell you how to do that and everything you need to know about the new iOS for this year now of course there are a lot of app specific features and there are some things under the hood we can talk about but really like starting surface level here the main thing you’re going to notice is a pretty stark redesign apple as the rumors suggested they would uh are really uh leaning into the Vision OS style of software aesthetics uh giving us more translucency and pop out menus and just I don’t want to say it’s like skumorphic but it’s more lifelike and a little bit less flat than what we’ve had from iOS for years and years and years now not as you know flat as iOS 7 was back in the day um but definitely just a bit of a different pop I’d say for iOS um which is a pretty big departure from what we’ve had from the last couple of years and in my opinion I think it looks pretty good at least from the 20 minutes I’ve seen it so far so Apple is calling this all new design language liquid glass and basically all elements of iOS 26 are made of liquid glass from the lock screen to the home screen app elements app icons everything here is liquid glass couple of things here to note right off the bat number one of course the lock screen is now liquid glass but also there is a new animated album uh artwork sort of mode here that you can turn on that basically will make whatever you’re listening to a little bit more interesting than like the static album artwork we’ve had before and then also there’s three new modes for sort of the overall look of the OS there’s of course the two standard ones light mode and dark mode but now there’s also a clear mode if you want something that really embraces liquid glass basically all over like rumor suggested the camera app has now been totally overhauled and actually kind of simplified now with basically on the surface just the two main modes you’re going to use either photo mode or video mode and then you can swipe in either direction to get more control and also jump into more of those different modes like cinematic mode for video or portrait mode for photos kind of nice they’re kind of cleaning up the clutter and just letting you see more of what you’re capturing also you know that Apple never wants to admit defeat but they did kind of say it without explicitly saying it the photos app has been tweaked now tabs are back to more easily navigate around the app so if you haven’t been a huge fan of the redesign that we got last year that is now kind of fixed in iOS 26 in Safari Liquid Glass is sort of going all in there as well actually giving you more space to see the web page so the web page sort of extends more edge to edge of the screen which is nice the whole search bar apparatus is now much smaller and can shrink when you’re scrolling through the web page like rumor suggested there’s also going to be a new option for a unified sort of look in the phone app that sort of brings everything together in sort of one uh unified space if you don’t want to jump between all those different tabs and then the call screening feature is also super cool basically now instead of just seeing you know spam call detected it sort of works i know Google’s got a solution like this where basically it will answer the call automatically for you basically allow you to gather information automatically from the machine on who’s calling what the purpose is and then your phone rings and basically then you can see what the purpose is we’ve had this sort of in voicemail screening for a while but now this is a bit more preemptive when someone actually you know with an unknown number or I guess a a registered spam number detects it uh calls you you’re sort of getting a a first line of defense that takes care of that for you before you actually have to pick up the phone if you even choose to pick it up at all and there’s also a new feature called hold assist that basically if you’re on hold the phone will automatically detect you are on hold it’ll basically take your place in line you can basically like swipe away from the call do your thing and not have to listen to that boring background music and then you’ll be notified once an agent actually returns back so nice little quality of life uh things that we deal with on the phone all the time inside of messages beyond just the uh new interface with liquid glass there is now the ability to add a background to your message so if you want something Telegram or WhatsApp you can have that look and then inside of group chats a couple of new features here that some of you might appreciate you can now run polls you can now send cash and receive cash through Apple Cache and then now group chats also support typing indicators so you can see who’s actually typing and responding in a group chat there are also some new built-in screening tools for unknown numbers and potential spam uh texts inside of the messages app as well and then kind of at least surprising for me Apple did spend some time talking about a number of Apple intelligence updates without actually admitting anything was wrong for example there is now the ability to do uh image creation with sort of the Gen Moji you knew before plus now actually going through the chat GPT engine so presumably this should give you actually now usable uh digital images you can create right on your iPhone with the whole Apple intelligence thing and then also Apple is now introducing visual intelligence beyond the camera app but now on your screen so the idea is you could take a screenshot of something and then use visual intelligence to look up to see hey where can I buy that jacket or hey add this to my calendar i think this was sort of what Siri was supposed to be able to do last year but now I guess it’s a new feature or something like that it’s a visual intelligence for the screen coming with iOS 26 couple of other odds and ends to round things out there’s a new games app for playing games managing games playing games with friends um you’re now able to do a couple of uh package tracking uh different things inside of the wallet app and some small minor updates with the wallet app as well apple Maps now has the ability to track where you’ve been so you can sort of look up places you’ve visited and also of course you can delete those if you need to apple did mention that and then a number of new live translation abilities are now live or will be live in iOS 26 in the messages app the uh phone app for like a phone call and also FaceTime as well so if you want to be able to talk to somebody in a different language iOS 26 is going to make that a bit easier to do uh with the help presumably of the smarts of Apple intelligence and all the ondevice power now I’ll also say that I have been sort of looking over some WWDC stuff really quickly and I do think there are some sort of hints at what’s coming with the iPhone 17 lineup but I’ll save that for a future video but for now I want to say that if you like what you see with this new version of iOS and you do want to get it right now you can do it for free and there are two main ways you can do this and also a ton of risk so let me just tell you right now you have been warned now back in the day comment down below if you remember the olden days of IPSWs and beta profiles and this and that apple used to hide this behind a payw wall it was super complicated and annoying now these days it’s free all you’ve got to do right now is go to developer.apple.com it’s the Apple developer portal you can create a free account if you don’t already have one and you can get the beta version of iOS installed on your iPhone right now if you’re really fast on this video it might not be there just yet but give it a couple hours and it will be there and basically you agree to some stuff and you basically will install this sort of like any old software update on your iPhone apple has really streamlined this process and it’s really nice and really easy and it’s fun and it sort of gives you first dibs and first access to all of the new features though there are a couple of things to keep in mind number one you’ve probably noticed this trend with Apple lately um they announce features and show them off at WWDC but they don’t come for quite some time so don’t expect every feature here that was shown off to be here on day one some of these are inevitably going to be delayed and pushed off a little bit so just know that you’re not going to get everything right away the second big thing to know is that the developer beta is sort of the bleeding edge of what Apple is releasing but it also has a lot of issues um most commonly you’re going to have issues with battery life cellular connectivity app support might be wonky the camera might be wonky basically if you’re okay taking your phone and jumbling it up and sort of rolling the dice every time you use it maybe it’ll be good today maybe it won’t be that is basically what the beta experience is going to give you uh things can change wildly from one version to the other so maybe it’s good on this version then it’s bad on the other basically just know that you’re sort of walking on eggshells with this thing and it could be bad or it could be good so just know that there are some risks involved especially going with the beta route and also if you run into issues and you have to restore your phone or leave the beta it can also just kind of be complicated for the first couple weeks so just know if you’re going to do this today do it at your own risk and I probably wouldn’t put it on your uh main phone though I know many of you are going to do it anyway so just I can say you’ve been warned now if you still want to get all the new features and try them out but you don’t want to be on as far of the cutting edge as the developer beta is there is of course what’s called the public beta this is the basically the same thing it’s just a version or two behind the developer beta it’s usually more stable and gives the public that’s really generally intended for everybody who’s not an app developer the chance to play around with these features and try it out on your own devices so on and so forth um you can get the public beta probably in the next couple of weeks or the next month or so apple usually spaces it out a bit so if you want to go the public route you can do so it’s free again basically the same install process but it’s not out just yet so if you want it today go the developer beta route do it at your own risk you want to wait a little bit uh wait for the public beta which should be coming probably sometime in July hopefully sooner but you never sort of know with Apple all right everybody so I am ultra ultra curious what are your thoughts on this did Apple deliver on the hype and the promises were the leaks what you were expecting are you going to be putting this beta on your phone right now and really is this enough to get you excited about the iPhone and the future of Apple software again or is this sort of too little too late and like a fresh coat of paint on a system with some really flawed big issues drop a comment down below and let me know appreciate you guys thank you so much for watching i’m Robert Rosenfeld from the Apple Circle and I’ll see you in the next one