New Settings In iOS 26 For the iPhone

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at some new settings for your iPhone in iOS26. Now once you've upgraded your iPhone to iOS26 there's some new settings you might want to checkout. Some of these are in the Settings App. Others are in the specific app or at the specific situation where you would use them. 

For instance, there's a new option for how the Home Screen icons look. You get to that by starting there on the Home Screen. I'm going to tap and hold on an empty space down here until everything wiggles in Edit Mode and I can tap Edit at the top left. Then I'm going to choose Customize. Now, like before, we have Default and Dark modes here for the icons and there's a Tint Mode where you can choose a color and have all the icons tinted that color. But now we also have another option. Clear. So let's select that and this is what the icons look like there. They'll just be Clear and you'll see some of your background through the icon. So this probably works best if you're using one of your own photos as a wallpaper. 

Now that just changes how your iPhone looks. But these next two functions they really will change how it works and probably help you out. If you go into Settings and then go down to the bottom you'll find Apps. So go into there and then go to the Phone App. There's a new option here for screening calls. You see Screen Unknown Callers, the default is Never. So it just is turned Off. But you also have the option to Silence Unknown Callers. So you just don't hear them and you could have done that before. There was an option for Silencing Unknown Callers. But a new option here is to Ask for the Reason for Calling. So, you won't hear a ring. Instead the other person will get an automated message that asks for their name and why they are calling. Once they provided that then it will ring and show you that information on your screen. So you can decide whether or not to answer the call. 

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Now the next new setting I want to show you is for Safari. But you don't actually get to it in the Safari App. Notice here I've got it set so that the Address Field is at the bottom and all the buttons are down here. Well, as you probably know you can change that to be at the top. If you go into Settings and then go into Safari, under Apps, you've got that option. But what is new now is you have three options instead of just two. So you've got the Compact look which is what I just showed there. But you can also have it be at the bottom and you can see here now I've got a very different look to things with an entire set of buttons here underneath the Address Bar. Or, you can do it at the top. Now you can see the Address Bar here at the top and the buttons at the bottom. 

Now in the Clock App you can, just as before, set Alarms. But now when you set an alarm you have a new setting. You can set the Snooze duration. I know a lot of people wanted this. It has always been just locked in at 9 minutes. But now you can tap here and you can set it for a little as 1 minute or as much as 15 minutes. 

In the Music App we've got a new option that a lot of people are already liking a lot. If you are playing a song here you'll see all the normal options. A new one you'll see is this one right here, two circles like this. If you turn it On you've turned on AutoMix. What AutoMix does is it fades one song into another. But it does more than just fading. It also attempts to match the beats per minute of each song. Kind of like what a DJ would do when going from one song to another. It's really interesting to use with your existing playlist too. It kind of brings new life to them. 

A new option in Settings under Battery is the ability to see how long it is going to take to complete the current charge. I, of course, have my phone plugged in and almost fully charged here. But it says that it's going to take nine minutes to go from this 98% to the 100% now. 

If you use headphones, like AirPods, with your iPhone you know sometimes when you get to a new location or you connect to something it will automatically switch the audio to that new device. You can stop that now with a new setting in General under AirPlay & Connectivity. You can turn on Keep Audio with Headphones. So it will come in real handy if you have to use your AirPods when in the car it won't automatically switch to your car's audio system when you connect to it with CarPlay. 

When you're browsing the web in Safari often you'll hit a page where you need to pay for something and you can Autofill your credit card information. But now you can control this information in the Wallet App. So when you go to Wallet and then you tap on the three dots here at the top you'll get AutoFill. Select that and then you'll see your existing cards. Then select one and now you'll see all the AutoFill information for that card and you can change it if you need to. 

In Settings under Accessibility there are, of course, lots of things for people that need them. But a lot of these features we all use. One of the really interesting features that has been added recently is the Background Sounds. iOS 26 has a whole bunch of new ones. So you can see here when I select Sound the list now is getting quite long. We've got Babble, Stream, Airplane, Boat, Bus, Train and a few others. 

This next setting you'll find in Podcast and it is really kind of hidden. When you are listening to a podcast you can tap here to change the speed. But there is also now a button for Enhanced Dialogue. So you turn that on and it's going to kind of filter the sound to boost the voices. 

The last one I want to show you here is under Accessibility & Settings as well. It's under Motion. There's these vehicle motion cues which already exist and they put these little dots on the side of the screen. It's supposed to help you use your iPhone if you are in a moving vehicle. But now, there's Customize Appearance. There are a ton of settings. You can change the color of the dots, the pattern whether it is regular or dynamic. You can change to larger dots or more dots. So you can customize this to see what works better for you. But also, I think, changing the colors may help for the dots not to get in the way so much as well. 

So in addition to all these new settings there are also a lot of new features in iOS and I'll be looking at those in videos coming up soon. Thanks for watching.