2 days ago
Apple iOS 26: 4 iPhone Apps To Gain Important Updates In Days, Report Claims
Apple's World Wide Developers Conference starts soon (on Monday, June 9) and it's widely expected to include significant updates to the design of apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac and more. A new report says that four of the most popular built-in apps are to gain new features.
Notes and other apps are about to be updated, it seems.
The apps in question are Messages, Music, Notes and CarPlay, according to a new report at 9to5Mac. Your mileage will vary, but I use the first three of these multiple times a day, and CarPlay, well, when I'm in the car, obviously.
The Apple Messages app already offers great security and lots of neat features, but it seems that live translation of incoming and outgoing messages is on the horizon. This is handy if someone sends you a message in another language, perhaps because they're passing on something they didn't understand, and you'll see it in your language instantly.
Additionally, it's claimed Apple is working on putting polls into Messages, something already available in WhatsApp, for instance. If Apple Intelligence is worked in here, it could suggest a poll based on your messages.
Separately, it's also thought that Apple could introduce end-to-end encryption for Messages going to or from Android phones as part of Apple's embrace of RCS. Details of that here.
The Music app, this and other reports say, could show animated album art on the lock screen, not just in the app itself. That could be neat.
I probably use Notes more than any other app. It's so versatile. In iOS 26, the app may introduce export for the Markdown format. This means you can easily put text in bold by typing **bold**, for instance, and when the note is exported, such formatting will remain.
Finally the new design language (codenamed Solarium, it is thought) which will be front-and-center for the WWDC announcements for iOS, iPadOS, macOS and watchOS, will also be coming to CarPlay. This is not a surprise but it shows Apple hasn't just been focusing on CarPlay Ultra recently.
