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Just “up”graded my iPhone to iOS 26 and I absolutely hate it. It’s visually the ugliest iOS Apple has ever produced. The icons all have a distracting (and non-sensical) edge to them. The blurred wallpapers look nothing like they used to.

It’s so ugly I’m thinking of cancelling my iPhone Air order and looking at Samsung options.
Just revert back. you can turn the effects off. My lord.
 
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One would expect quite a bit more then a new button design from a company the size of Apple. There's hardly even a new feature and bugs are all over the place. I wonder exactly what they've been doing in the past year?
 
That all works like 💩. Been here, tried it all. Even purchased few paid themes and icon packs (that turned to be disgusting low resolution do*****). And Samsung doesn’t even care to somehow clean up that mess.

What I love in Apple is that everything works good out of the box. I would love proper theming capability + icon replacement tho, so everyone would be happy, with 3 preinstalled styles: default, minimal and oldschool (that nice iOS 6 aesthetic)
Also been there and currently have a S24 in use and have no complaint. As they say, art is in the eye of the beholder, the same can be said for cellphone UI’s. That’s why there is a huge choice. When you have a family member with some visual impairments, IOS 26 is a huge issue.
 
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Best setting I’ve found to make 26 work nicely is “increase contrast” under accessibility, much easier to read and seems much, much faster (snappier) with that enabled as well
 
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It's very early days and I did hesitate for the first time based on some of these comments + owning a standard iPhone 13.
However, I updated a MacBook Air M3 last night and a Mac Mini M1. This morning I bit the bullet and did the phone.
I have to say that, so far, I'm very impressed. Change is always difficult with something that is with us every day and all of us will have become very used to the way previous versions of iOS looked and behaved.
This new version is a far more radical change than recent versions but, at this point, everything works for me - I've been out and about this morning purchasing with Apple Pay, taking photos, using 3rd part apps for shopping and checking out video content I created yesterday in Final Cut.
I left the phone charging throughout the update and then updated all the apps. As expected, the phone became warm but once that was all done the battery life seems to show a distinct improvement.
It's entirely likely I will find something not working but so far it's all been positive.
 
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It’s appalling, all style over substance. Outside of some genuinely decent new features, the new interface has been designed with eye candy in mind rather than actual improvements to usability.

macOS is whole other level of stupidity.
Spot on analysis.

When they introduced the new Jony Ive look (iOS 7?), it looked weird and odd. But I could tell something was being attempted. There was substance. There was an idea. There was bravery in implementing it. People hated it at the time but their arguments were purely subjective. There was a powerful objective argument behind it all. It was quite simply good design!

And now, of course, every new technology (especially AI) is using the same mix of discordant colours.

But iOS 26...? There's just none of the above. There's no objective design truth to it. It's regressive. Even worse, it's just silly. Rounded edges on everything? Windows, maybe that's OK. But Safari tabs? UI buttons? The amount of wasted pixels is mind-blowing.

I'm not a design nerd. I tend to follow Apple's lead. But this time around, it just indicates something is so, so wrong over at Apple HQ. This was a bad decision.
 
I feel very represented by this post, my experience is currently the same. And I made the mistake of updating my MB Pro M4 to Tahoe, now I have to live with the ugliest and glitchiest OS I have tried in a very long time :(
What's been glitchy? I've been using the Tahoe public betas on my main device, my M3 Pro MacBook Pro, and I've barely had an issue. It looks and runs great for me!
 
I feel very represented by this post, my experience is currently the same. And I made the mistake of updating my MB Pro M4 to Tahoe, now I have to live with the ugliest and glitchiest OS I have tried in a very long time :(
Apple has never restricted rolling back macs, you can always install any os supported on the machine, so just switch back if you want to avoid tahoe for now 🤷‍♂️
 
What's been glitchy? I've been using the Tahoe public betas on my main device, my M3 Pro MacBook Pro, and I've barely had an issue. It looks and runs great for me!

I'm happy you've had a smooth experience, not the same here. The menu bar keeps glitching like crazy, Safari tabs seem to be undecided about what color they wanna be and the keyboard is failing on me as I type this xD
 
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Apple has never restricted rolling back macs, you can always install any os supported on the machine, so just switch back if you want to avoid tahoe for now 🤷‍♂️

Oh, I know that I can technically do it. But I do not have the time to deal with a restore right now, so I'm just venting though I know I should have waited a bit.
 
Just “up”graded my iPhone to iOS 26 and I absolutely hate it. It’s visually the ugliest iOS Apple has ever produced. The icons all have a distracting (and non-sensical) edge to them. The blurred wallpapers look nothing like they used to.

It’s so ugly I’m thinking of cancelling my iPhone Air order and looking at Samsung options.
Remember what I said before wwdc : I don't care about the new design, please bring more features !!

Yeah I still say that.
 

That seems like a decent list of stuff to me. Is there anything specific that you all think is missing?
 
Also been there and currently have a S24 in use and have no complaint. As they say, art is in the eye of the beholder, the same can be said for cellphone UI’s. That’s why there is a huge choice. When you have a family member with some visual impairments, IOS 26 is a huge issue.
Hmm. I haven’t used 26 on my phone yet but tried it on another phone (iPhone SE3), animations and some effects definitely feel a bit nauseating. Idk what causes this. It feels like it needs a lot of tweaking to become more palatable.

I am planning to upgrade to 17 Pro and wonder how will it work with new PWM switch, because iPhones had been giving me eye strain ever since OLED
 
I'm happy you've had a smooth experience, not the same here. The menu bar keeps glitching like crazy, Safari tabs seem to be undecided about what color they wanna be and the keyboard is failing on me as I type this xD
That does sound irritating. The only issue I have had is probably actually a bad monitor cable causing the DisplayPort drivers triggering a kernel panic in specific and trivially avoided circumstances.
 
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Worst IOS experience for me.

Never downgraded before, but I will.

I love the minimalism we have with IOS 18 and the previous version, in term of design. Now it just looks like they returned 15 years in the past where everything tried to be 3D with a lot of animations.
 
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