How To Use Your iPhone’s New Features In iOS 26.1

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at what is new on your iPhone in iOS 26.1.

Now earlier this week Apple released iOS 26.1 for your iPhone. If your iPhone was compatible with iOS 26 you could upgrade now to 26.1. To do that just go to the Settings App and then to General and the look for Software Update. It will then search for the software update and walk you through updating your iPhone. Perhaps the most talked about new feature is the ability to tone down the new Liquid Glass look a bit. 

If you go into Settings and then you scroll down to find Display & Brightness you'll see this new Liquid Glass setting. Select that and you can choose between Clear, which is exactly how iOS 26 looked and a tinted look here which will make many of the controls more opaque, like this. Don't expect too big of a change though. For instance, with Clear on this is what Control Center looks like. You're really not going to notice any difference if you turn on Tinted. The difference is more pronounced when you're looking at Controls, like at the controls here at the bottom of Safari. This is with the setting set to Clear. This is with the settings set to Tinted. Take a look at Maps while it is set to Clear and now look at how it looks when set to tinted. 

Now if you really want to depart from the Clear look in Liquid Glass you still have the settings in Accessibility, under Display & Text Size, and you can turn on Reduce Transparency. Now you'll notice that the Control Center blanks out everything behind it and other things like the Dock down here at the bottom that were transparent before are now much more opaque. But do note if you have Reduced Transparency turned On, then if you go back to Display & Brightness you can no longer switch between Clear and Tinted. Reduced Transparency overrides either one. 

Now there's a big change that you will notice if you use Alarms on your iPhone. I'm going to create one here that will go off in one minute. Then I'm going to lock my phone and you'll see how things have changed now when the Alarm goes off. So you can see here when the alarm goes off I've got a large Snooze Button. But if I want to stop the alarm I can't just tap on this, I have to slide it over to the right to Stop it. This prevents you from accidentally hitting the Stop button instead of the Snooze button. 

Now another new feature that involves Sliding is in the Music App. So now when you're playing music in the Music App you've got the little mini player here at the bottom. Before you would have buttons that you would tap to go to the next song or the previous song in the playlist or album. But now you can swipe. So to go to the next song I just swipe from right to left.

There's a third feature that involves swiping. If you're on your Lock Screen you probably know that you can swipe from the right to the left to go right to the Camera. Now you may know because you use that a lot.  Or you may know because you accidentally do it all the time and it's annoying. iOS 26.1 allows you now to turn that off. So, you would go to Settings and then go and look, of course, for Camera. Then there's a new setting down here for Lock Screen Swipe to Open Camera. You can turn that Off. 

Now while we're in Settings let's go back here and go to Privacy & Security. There's a new settings that's all the way at the bottom under Background Security Improvements. You can now turn On Automatically Install. It should be on by default. This will install important security updates quietly in the background. 

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 I've got one more setting for you. If you go to the top level and then go to General here there's a new setting under Local Capture. Local Capture is a new feature in iOS 26 that allows you to record when you're on a phone call or FaceTime. Now you can choose the Save location for where those recordings go and you can choose Audio Only if you want to record, say, FaceTime but just the audio portion. So this feature is handy if you use FaceTime to record a podcast. You can get the Audio recording saved without doing anything special. Once you've got FaceTime going you can bring up Control Center and then if you don't have it already you can add the control for Local Capture. Then you can turn that On to capture the audio or audio and video from the FaceTime call.  

Now for some people all these changes are nothing compared to the big change of the addition of new languages for Apple Intelligence and for Live Translation. These are the new languages added for Apple Intelligence. So, if you're using one of these languages you just got all of the Apple Intelligence features that weren't available to you before. Also, for Live Translation these are the new languages that are available in iOS 26.1. 

Of this update also features lots of bugs fixes and small updates, like for instance the Apple TV icon here looks a little bit different. When you go into Settings you may notice that some of the Headings for some of the settings are now left justified. Little things like that. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.