13 iOS 26 Features Coming To Your iPhone You May Not Have Heard About

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some new features of iOS26 for your iPhone that you may not have heard of yet.

So by now you have probably heard of all the big new features of iOS 26. Like the new liquid glass look. But often people have a favorite feature of a new operating system that isn't something big but something small. So here's a look at some tiny changes that could be a big deal for some people.

So first it is now easier than ever to add your own custom ringtone in iOS. Before you had to do all sorts of different things, often involving the GarageBand app to add a new ringtone. But now you can do it right from the File's App. In the File's App if you have an Audio File, like a MP3 file or many other formats, you can tap and hold it and then go to Share. One of the options you'll see down here is to Add New Ringtone. Now there is only room for three here but if you tap More then you'll see a fourth one and more below. So you can see here Use As Ringtone is an option. You can select that and then it adds it as a Custom Ringtone. It takes you right into the Settings App into Sounds and you can see your Custom ones above the line. The sound still has to be less than thirty seconds, like before, but it is so much easier to add. In fact you can just download files online. I've actually got a bunch of them that I've had forever at MacMost.com/ringtones and you could just download these, like that, and then easily add them once they are in the Files App. Once you've got them in the list you can not only add them here under Ringtone or they also appear here at the bottom under Text Tones as well. In the Contacts App you can Edit any contact that you want and you can add a ringtone that is specific to that contact.

Now for years people have been wishing for this small feature. In the Clock App under Alarms here you can now add an alarm and notice a new setting, the Snooze Duration. You no longer have to do just nine minutes. You can select your own snooze amount and set it for just that particular alarm. Set it for something different for another alarm.

Now a big new feature of iPad OS is the addition of the Preview App. But it is also been added for the iPhone as well. The Preview App, as you can expect, allows you to view PDF's and images just like on the Mac. There are Markup Tools and everything. But what is really interesting is that you can tap here and not only create a new document from the Clipboard, like you can on the Mac, but you can also create a new Empty Image, allowing you to start with a blank slate and then use Markup Tools to draw or add shapes or whatever you want. Hopefully this feature will come to Preview on the Mac as well. But so far it is not there yet in the first Beta of Tahoe.

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Now in the Messages App there is a lot of attention being paid to the new polls but another new feature is that when you tap and hold a message like this you can, of course, copy it just like before. But what is new now is Select and now you can select just some of the text like you can in other apps.

There is also a tiny new feature that is going to be really useful to some people in Dictation which, of course, you can use across all sorts of different apps. I'll demo it here in Messages. So I can start dictation and I can now spell using letters and there's no special command or gesture to do it. You just start doing it. (Let me talk to Teri t e r i about this).

There's a small new feature in the Settings App. You go to Battery and then you have your iPhone on a charger. It will show you here how long it should take to charge either to a partially full charge, you see four minutes left here until it gets to 80%, but also until it gets to 100% it will take a hour and two minutes at the current rate.

There's a tiny new feature in the Music App. You can go in your Library to Playlist and like before you can use the Plus button to add a new playlist. You can also add Folders but on the Mac not on iOS until now. Now if I tap the Plus button and I can create new folders right here on my iPhone. They already worked before but you had to make them on your Mac and then you would see them here. Now you can actually make these folders here on the iPhone.

Now in Settings, under Accessibility, there's a whole new hidden app. We go to Read & Speak, there's something called the Accessibility Reader and I've turned it on here. Once it is on you have to find a way to trigger it. The typical way to do that is to use the Accessibility Shortcut right here which would be triple clicking this side button on this particular iPhone and I have it set to just accept Accessibility Reader. If you select several of these then you get a choice when you activate it. 

Now if I go to an app and I'm reading something like an article or a webpage or in this case email, if I activate the Accessibility Shortcut it goes to the Accessibility Reader and it shows me just the text kind of like Reader View in Safari. But it also allows me to use the Play Button down here to have it speak the text to me. I can also customize how this looks by tapping on the three buttons there and then I can customize the Reader and choose different themes, like that. I can even Edit the themes here, changing the background color, the font, and size and all of that.

In the News App if you have an Apple News Plus subscription you have a new Game. Apple has been steadily adding games like two different types of crossword puzzles, Sudoko, and so on. Now there is something call ed the Emoji Game that you play by dragging sets of emoji to match the blank spaces here. I've tried it and if you like puzzles and word games it will be another thing that you play everyday for a few minutes.

Another small but very useful setting you're going to find under General. Then go to AirPlay & Continuity. There's a setting here for Keep Audio in Headphones. When you turn this On it means that if you're listening with your headphones but then you connect to say your car or to another Bluetooth device it is not going to automatically switch the audio to that devices.

Also here in Settings if you go to Accessibility and then go down to Hearing and to Audio & Visual there's background sounds. I know there are a lot of people that love this and what is great news is now there are a whole bunch of new sounds. The first set here was already available but all of these at the bottom are new.

Now the new Glass look for Controls means that you'll see some of the text below things. You see it here in Safari. If you bring up Control Center you definitely see how you can see the elements below it. Some people have already said that they don't really like that. Well, you can actually turn it Off using an existing Accessibility feature that is still there and works really well with liquid glass. So you would go into Settings and then to Accessibility and under Vision there's Display & Text Size. You've got Reduce Transparency. So if you turn that On we can go and see how it changes those controls here at the bottom of Safari. So the color shows through just a bit. It just tints the element a tiny bit, but it doesn't make them transparent anymore. You can see a drastic change when it comes to Control Center.

Now there is one last feature that isn't actually available yet in the first Beta. But we expect to see it either sometime this summer or maybe just when iOS 26 is released. That's a new feature that uses the satellite connection of your iPhone to a network of satellites. The most recent iPhones can already use this in the US and Canada to send text messages in emergency situations. But a new feature of this will be getting weather reports. As someone who often goes back country camping one of the critical things when you're living out of doors for a couple of days is to get up to date weather reports. If you've got no connection you basically have to go with the report you had before you left. But now it looks like you'll be able to get up dates even when there's no mobile connection at all. There may be more hidden or tiny features iOS 26 that have yet to be discovered or yet to appear since its early on in the beta process.

Thanks for watching.