Apple has released iOS 26.1 and iPadOS 26.1 beta 1 to developers, just a week after the general availability of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. Here’s everything new in this update for iPhone and iPad.
The update is available to all registered beta testers so if you hadn’t unenrolled your iPhone or iPad from the developers beta program, you can download and install the new update by going to Settings > General > Software Update.
The update is a full fledged 14.29 GB for iPhone 16 Pro Max, and even larger for M4 iPad Pro models. Despite the download size, there isn’t a lot of visible changes in this update.
We have been going through the update, and here is everything new in this release so far:
- Apple expanding Image Playground beyond ChatGPT
- Apple betas lay MCP groundwork for Agentic AI
- iOS 26.1 beta hints at third-party smartwatch support for iPhone
- Apple has experimented with Liquid Glass, yet again, in this beta update. In some places, the glass appears more frosted than refractive or “glassy”. While the Phone app gets some Liquid Glass love as the buttons. Hopefully, this is Apple working on brining full fledged Liquid Glass everywhere, including to its own apps.
- Despite the media’s claims, Apple Intelligence is very much alive and kicking. Apple has added support for Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Portuguese (Portugal), Vietnamese, and Turkish in this update.
- AirPods Live Translation gets support for new languages which include: Chinese (Mandarin Traditional and Simplified) Japanese, Korean, and Italian.
- More Liquid Glass frostiness:
- A much needed improvement to the video scrubber in Photos app but it also looks more frosted glass than Liquid Glass:
So far, these are the changes we have found in the beta. Overall, it seems stable and not too buggy but we will continue testing on both iPhone and iPad. We will update this post if we find any other noticeable new changes.
If you have updated to the new beta and find any new changes, do let us know!
