iOS 26: Here's my favorite 13 hidden features that will make your life easier

Yahoo

15 hours ago

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.
Not only is the iOS 26 public beta available to download right now, Apple is expected to release the stable version sometime next month — bringing all the biggest updates and features to iPhone users everywhere. The thing to remember, though, is that Apple can only tell us so much about the software and that means some things get left out.
Apple may have focussed a lot of its attention on the Liquid Glass redesign but, as ever, there are plenty more features hiding under the surface. In fact, a lot of these features could be a major benefit to you, and you didn't even know they were there.
Technically we're still in beta, which means things could still change, but for now here are 13 of the best iOS 26 hidden features you should know about.
Make Liquid Glass Opaque
Liquid Glass has proven somewhat controversial for a variety of reasons, but if you find yourself struggling with the transparent windows and icons you're in luck. Apple has hidden a toggle in the Accessibility settings that lets you turn Liquid Glass windows opaque — which some have commented makes everything significantly easier to read.
Head to Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Reduce Transparency. This then gives you a solid background in iOS 26, often in some shade of gray or brown. You can also Increase Contrast to make buttons and icons appear a little clearer, and not blur into the background.
Custom Snooze
iOS has long kept your alarm clock's snooze feature limited to nine minutes, with no room for any deviation. iOS 26 changes that, letting you set the snooze time anywhere from one minute to 15. That way, you can decide how long you can lie in bed, acting as though the extra few minutes will make much difference to your mood for the rest of the day.
Open the clock app, tap the alarm in question and select the Snooze duration option.
Easy bookmarking
Need to bookmark something, but don't want to go through all the motions that usually involves? iOS 26 makes that a lot easier, provided you use the Safari browser. Simply tap the Three dot menu on the bottom right, and the bookmark options menu will appear automatically.
Adaptive Power
Nobody likes their phone using too much power, regardless of why that's happening. iOS 26 tries to keep that from happening with the new Adaptive Power feature. The aim is to stretch out your battery for as long as possible by altering performance and settings in the process. That includes reducing brightness and slowing down apps.
If you're happy with that trade-off head to Settings > Battery > Power Mode > Adaptive Power.
Charge time estimates
Rather than making you guess when your phone is going to be fully charged, iOS 16 can now show you a rough estimate of how long your current session will take. We're not sure why it took Apple so long to implement it, but at least it's here now.
This feature is switched on by default in iOS 26, but you can still see it in two different places. First on the lockscreen, which will show you how long you have until 80% then 100%. You can also see the same information by heading to Settings > Battery > Charging. There's a graph at the top of the screen showing how long you have until your phone hits 80% and 100%.
Dirty lens warnings
Another default hidden feature is the dirty lens warning, which will automatically tell you if iOS 26 thinks your camera lens needs a little wipe down. Lest your shots be ruined by a fingerprint smudge or something like that.
You can ignore this, and it is easy to miss if you're not careful. So be sure to keep an eye on the camera app.
HDR screenshots
If you want your screenshots to have the same Dynamic Range effects as your photos, then you're in luck. iOS 26 lets you add HDR to all your screenshots by heading to Settings > General > Screen Capture.
Just be aware that this can cause compatibility issues with non-Apple products. That's because it changes all your screenshots to the HEIF format, and recordings to the HEVC — the same formats as the iPhone camera.
Spatial Scenes
iOS 26 lets you scrap the boring old flat lockscreens of past updates, letting you add depth and 3D effects to make things a little more interesting. However the focus is on using spatial images that you've taken with your iPhone's camera.
We have a more in-depth guide on how to make the most of Spatial Scenes, but here's the quick version. Tap and hold your iPhone lock screen then press the + icon in the bottom right. From here you can Select your background and are taken through the motions of adjusting the photo and changing both the font and color of the lock screen .
The final stages involve adding lock screen widgets and customizing your Control Center shortcuts to make the lock screen fit your needs.
Apple Music's lyric translations
A lot of music is sung in English, but there's still a lot of great stuff that isn't — and in the past you may have been wondering what you're actually singing along to. With IOS 26 select songs in certain languages can be translated in Apple Music's Lyrics tab.
Once there tap the Translate button on the bottom left. This gives you the option to Show pronunciation and Show Translation. The former spells out the lyrics phonetically, in their original language, letting you sing along more accurately. The latter switches the lyrics into your native language, letting you see exactly what they're saying.
Polls in group chats
We all know getting a consensus in a group is a difficult task, especially if it's a group chat where everyone is constantly bombarding the feed with suggestions or feedback. So if you need to get an idea of what everyone's thinking quickly, and without reading a novel's worth of messages, simply make a poll in the group chat.
It will only work if everyone has iOS 26 installed, which is a big caveat, and naturally means you can't poll any green bubbles in the group. But if you are all rocking the latest iPhone software tap the + icon in the bottom left, and select Polls. Type in your options, and then send it out to everyone.
Once they have it you can see profile photos of everyone who voted, letting you know who chose what.
Call screen
Spam callers are a blight on modern life, but iOS 26 can help keep them far away from you. With Call Screen unknown numbers are intercepted by the software, and can be turned on very quickly. Head to Settings > Phone > Screen Incoming Calls
Call screen asks unknown numbers to identify themselves, and state the purpose of their call. With that information iOS 26 can then ask you if you want to pick up and speak to whoever is on the other end, or if you want to send them straight to voicemail. So no more robo-callers telling you that you're going to be arrested if you don't pay your back taxes in the form of Chilli's gift cards.
Filter spam messages
On a similar note, Apple has added a feature that helps filter out spammy text messages as well. This filters out messages from unknown senders and keeps them separate from the rest of your inbox.
Simply tap the filter settings button in the top right of the Messages app, then select Manage Filtering. You then have two options available: Screen Unknown Senders and Filter Spam. The former automatically hides notifications from unknown senders and filters them into a separate list, while the latter is your long-standing filter that softs spam into your junk folder.
Get the old Camera navigation system back
If you've used the camera in iOS 26 you may have noticed that cycling through different camera modes doesn't work the same. In the past you swiped to scroll through the mode bar at the bottom of the screen, whereas now Apple's having you swipe from the direction you want to go.
Which can be pretty confusing, but fortunately you can set things back to the way they were. Head into Settings > Camera then scroll down until you see the Classic Mode Switching toggle. That restores the old, familiar way of camera app navigation for you.
More from Tom's Guide
I used iOS 26 Shortcuts to build some AI-powered workflows — here's what you can do now
iPhone 17 Pro Max vs iPhone 14 Pro Max: Biggest expected upgrades
Your AirPods could become a live translation tool with iOS 26 — here's how