iOS 26 looks new and modern. And for once, how Apple describes it — liquid glass — makes sense: it’s a lot of layers of transparent elements overlapping and, in places, the animations are quite… liquidy. Menus and buttons will respond to your touch, with some of them coalescing around your finger and sometimes separating out into new menus.

Indeed, Liquid Glass does bring somewhat of a major change to iOS 26, or what we would have called iOS 18 (Apple is switching iOS numbers to years, and iOS 26 will release in the fall). I've been using the developer beta of iOS 26 for some weeks now,

Select "send message," for example, and the Spotlight Search bar fills with a Mad Libs-esque series of blanks for key details like the message you want to send and the person you want to send it to. Type to fill the details in, hit Tab to switch between fields, and hit Enter when you're ready to send the message.