Hidden Features In iOS 26 To Try Out

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. So while the big new features of iOS 26 are things like the new liquid glass look and the new Preview App, there are a lot of small features that could be useful to you. 

Let's start off by looking at the Lock Screen. Of course you've got the time here at the top of the Lock Screen. You can customize that more now in iOS 26. So to do that you want to go to the Settings App and then go to Wallpaper. Then from there choose the wallpaper that you're using. So I'll just choose this one here and I'll click on it to customize. Now you'll notice the little handle there at the bottom right corner. You can drag that and make the time even larger. But another thing you can do with the Lock Screens now is you can use the new Spatial Scenes ability to take one of your photos, so I'll just select one like, say, this one here, and I'll use that as my wallpaper here on the Lock Screen. I'll tap this button here that will convert that to a spatial scene. Now, you see, I can move my phone, I'm just kind of changing the orientation a little bit, and how it figures out which objects are near and which objects are far and make the entire thing 3D. 

You can do this for individual photos without going to the Lock Screen too, by just going into the Photos App and then choosing any photo you want, like let's choose this one here, and then look for that spatial scene's button here at the top right. It converts it to a spatial scene and now you can just enjoy that there on your phone. You can even zoom in and use it there to just get some depth out of your photos. 

Another new feature of the Lock Screen is that now not only will you see the amount of battery you've got left but if your phone is charging you'll see an estimated time to a full charge at the top as well. 

Speaking of battery consumption there's a new way to figure out which apps are using the battery the most. So you go into Settings and then you go to Battery. Then you'll see as before apps that are using a lot of battery power. But now instead of trying to figure out which apps are using the most battery based on the amount they've used and the amount of time you'll get these little Alerts here to the right. You can see I've got a few apps that are using a lot of power. So you can go into each individual app, like this, and get more details as well. 

Now when you take a screenshot by holding the volume Up button and and side button we've got a new interface now in iOS 26 for how this looks. If I tap on the floating thumbnail there at the bottom you can see things look quite a bit different now. It's just as easy as before though to Crop to what you want, to use the Markup Tools here, and to Share. 

If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 2000 others that support MacMost at Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com/patreon. 

Now if your iPhone is new enough to be capable of using Apple Intelligence you can take a screenshot and use Visual Intelligence to identify things that are on the screen. So here I am in an app and I will take a screenshot like this and you can see it's going to give me information there at the bottom of things. I can just tap and it will look it up. But I can also just use my finger and circle something in here and then it will look it up and you can see how it is going to search to find things that have to do with whatever it is I circled. Also, after doing that I can tap the Speech Bubble at the bottom left and it's going to look things up using Apple Intelligence and I can ask questions about it as well. 

Now the Camera App looks very different as well. It now has video and photo modes at the bottom and a lack of buttons that you may be used to. But you can customize which buttons are there by going into Settings and then go down to Camera. Then look for Indicators here. You can turn On or Off the Flash or Live Photo or other features like Action Mode depending upon your model. 

There's also a new feature that will alert you if it detects some dust or dirt or something on the lens of your iPhone's camera. 

Now the Messages App has some new tricks as well. One of the things you can do is you can use the Plus Button here and in addition to adding all the media and things you could do before, you can add a Poll now. So, you can poll the people in a group chat for say, where everybody wants to meet for dinner or talk about next. 

You can also set a Background for conversation. So this can just be between you and one other person or in a group chat like this. Just tap on the Info at the top there and then select Backgrounds here. Then you can set a background to one of these or use one of your photos. So, for instance, I can use this one here and it's even animated, like that. That's now the background for whenever I go into this conversation. 

Also note that before you could only select the entire bubble here and copy it. But now you can also use Select here and just select a piece of the text and copy that. 

Also there is the ability to do in chat translation. So if you're chatting with somebody in the Messages App that is speaking a different language and it is one of the supported languages it should translate for you to your language and they can do the same as long as they are using iOS 26.

Now in Settings if you go down to Apps here and then go to Phone there is a new setting in here for Screening. So in addition to being able to screen unknown callers and silence unknown callers, you can now choose Ask Reason For Calling. If somebody isn't in your Contacts then, what they will hear is a message asking them to state their name and the reason for calling. It will then display this as text for you when your phone rings. So you can decide whether or not to answer. 

Another thing we have now is in the Phone App when you go to the Calls page you can go to a caller here and you'll see details. But you can also look at their call history. So you can go back and see your entire history between you and another person. 

Now the Music App has a few new tricks as well. You can now go to your Library here and go to Playlists and you can now create a new Folder. Before you had to do that on a Mac and then it would appear here, syncing over iCloud if you were using, say, Apple Music. But now you can actually just create new Folders right on your iPhone and store playlists in them. 

You can also Pin playlists, songs, albums, and artists. So here I've got a playlist. If I tap and hold on it right here you see I can Pin this playlist. So now when I go back to the top of my Library section I'll see that playlist right there. If I go to Artists and I pin an artist you'll see there I now see an artist and a playlist pinned to the top. I know longer have to dig down into the sections to find those. 

Another new feature is when you're listening to a song that's not in your language, if it is a supported language, you can go to the Lyrics for it and you can see translations right here underneath the original language. You can also tap here and Hide the translation and you can, with some songs like say Korean, Japanese, Chinese songs, you can show pronunciation and then get English pronunciation guides underneath the actual song lyrics. That kind of ties into the iPhone's Sing functionality right here so it makes it easier for you to sing along with those pronunciations. 

Also now when you're playing a Playlist you should notice there's a button here that you can switch On or Off that is Automix. Automix doesn't just fade one song into the other in the Playlist but it also does all sorts of stuff that DJ's and radio stations would do to have it seamlessly go from one song to another, like matching the beats and things like that. There is a settings in the Settings App in Apps Music for song transitions where you can set it from Automix to Crossfade if you prefer that. 

Going back to your Lock Screen there is a neat music related feature that now if you were to tap on the album artwork here in the Live area of what is going on in the Lock Screen, you can have the album artwork actually just fill your Lock Screen. 

There's also a new feature in the Podcast App, when you're listening to a podcast you can tap on the podcast there to get the details of what you're listening to. If you tap where it shows speed another option here is to enhance the dialogue. 

A great new feature of the Passwords App is that when you're viewing individual password here you now can view the history of that password. So if you make a change to your password and you're kind of afraid to loose that original one in case the change didn't take on the website, you don't have to worry about that anymore because you can go back and see the previous password in the History and just a whole little list of every time you've changed it or updated it and what it used to be. 

Now if you're to a fan of Liquid glass, like, for instance, here's what Control Center looks like in Liquid Glass and you can see some of the background behind Control Center showing through, well you do have the option to kind of turn Off that transparency. You want to go into Settings here and you're going to find this Accessibility. You want to go to Display and then you just want to turn On Reduce Transparency. So now when you bring up Control Center you can see it's a totally solid color in the background. 

One last new feature I want to show you is in the Maps App. In the Maps App now you can look at Recents and it will keep a list of recent places that you've searched for, of course recent places that you've gotten directions to, but also just recent places that you've been. So if you go to a restaurant but you didn't even use the Maps App to get there or anything like that, then it will still kind of pick that out and remember that here in the list. 

So there are a lot of the little things that you might find useful that are new in iOS 26. Thanks for watching.