Installed it on my 16P after the RC dropped yesterday. Has been flawless so far. I'm not a huge fan of the more cartoony look of the home screen icons/folders, but otherwise I like it, and love that they finally sped up some of the navigation animations.
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Is it worth updating now to the 26 beta, having held off all this time?
- Thread starter The Cockney Rebel
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I also installed it on my iPad Mini 5 (much older obviously) and it's running flawlessly on that as well.
iOS 26 is the worst release of iOS in years mostly due to the horrific change for the sake of change UI nonsense. Liquid Glass aka Make it Hard To Read Stuff skin is a travesty. The new transparencies make things objectively harder to read. The new Messages colors are awful, and faded versions of their prior self, and there’s only so much you can do in Accessibility to revert these changes.
And on top of it all, it’s laggier and slower than iOS 18, with choppy animations. Even the screenshot shortcut takes longer to work. The camera app is now even worse, with awful controls to switch to e.g. Portrait, and that whole bar is choppy as well on an iPhone 16 Pro Max.
I suspect the new iPhone Pro line, with increased speed and 50% more RAM will do much better, but for those of us not on iPhone 17 Pro, iOS 26 is a downgrade in terms of performance, and it’s not subtle.
And on top of it all, it’s laggier and slower than iOS 18, with choppy animations. Even the screenshot shortcut takes longer to work. The camera app is now even worse, with awful controls to switch to e.g. Portrait, and that whole bar is choppy as well on an iPhone 16 Pro Max.
I suspect the new iPhone Pro line, with increased speed and 50% more RAM will do much better, but for those of us not on iPhone 17 Pro, iOS 26 is a downgrade in terms of performance, and it’s not subtle.
I know it's anecdotal, but I haven't experienced laggy or slower or choppy anything so far (16P for my phone, iPad Mini 5th Gen as well). I agree on some of the aesthetic stuff, but there are things I like about it as well.
I've used "Increase Contrast" in the past to help with Messages colors - simply because I liked the darker blue and green hues. But that has a more significant effect on the rest of the OS now than it did before, so I don't know if it's worth it. But that could help a bit with some of what you're saying.