iOS 26 Public Beta, 12 Hours In: Liquid Glass Dazzles, Batteries Beg for Mercy

Barely half a day after Apple opened the download gate, early adopters have begun stress‑testing the iOS 26 public beta—and their first‑round verdict is equal parts awe and annoyance. Installation is straightforward (2‑3 GB over the air), and most users on iPhone 15 Pro report a reboot‑to‑home‑screen time of under 25 minutes, but what happens next depends heavily on your hardware .

Visually, Liquid Glass is the undisputed star: Control Centre tiles float like frosted panes, widgets shimmer when you scroll, and the lock‑screen clock now glows against whatever lies beneath. On OLED flagships the effect is “gorgeous but bright,” yet dozens of MacRumors forum posts say small text can fade into busy wallpapers and ask Apple for a transparency slider. Reddit testers on older LCD iPhone 11s go further, calling certain drop‑down menus “nearly unreadable” unless Reduce Transparency is enabled. Apple dialled back the glassiness in Developer Beta 4, but it still splits opinion.

Performance is a tale of two chipsets. A15‑plus devices feel as snappy as iOS 25, and several r/iOSBeta users say frame‑rate stutter from the first dev builds is gone. By contrast, A14 and earlier phones run hotter and drop battery faster—one Redditer clocked a 50 % drain in six hours of light use on an iPhone 12. Spotlight indexing and Photos re‑analysis will settle in a day or two, but for now endurance is a gamble if the phone is your daily driver.

Apple Intelligence shows real promise. Genmoji turns “shocked sloth on a skateboard” into a sticker‑quality emoji in under a second on the A17 chip, and Live Translation keeps latency low enough that two bilingual testers held a seamless English‑Spanish FaceTime call. Accents still trip the model—Brazilian Portuguese occasionally renders as Spanish—and the feature is entirely absent on pre‑A17 hardware. AI Notification Summaries return after a dev‑beta hiatus with bold “Summarized by Apple Intelligence” badges; they’re useful for news clusters, but Macworld warns the AI occasionally invents missing context, so heavy news readers may prefer them off for now .

The new Games hub is essentially Apple Arcade plus a Steam‑style wishlist; it launches smoothly and respects Focus filters. CarPlay widgets now mirror the phone’s Liquid Glass theme, though a handful of Volkswagen owners in the MacRumors thread report blank tiles on first launch . One repeatable bug: the Camera app crashes when HDR is toggled on an iPhone 12 mini—a Reddit find that we reproduced once before it vanished after force‑closing.

Should you jump in? The Verge and 9to5Mac rave about the fresh coat of glass and the AI perks, but Macworld’s cautious take—that you “probably shouldn’t install yet” if you rely on flawless battery and third‑party banking apps—remains sensible . If you do plunge, back up first, expect a day of re‑indexing heat, and remember that Apple may tweak transparency and power management in next week’s Beta 5. For design lovers and language nerds, the first 12 hours already feel like a leap into Apple’s post‑skeuomorphic future; for everyone else, the glass may be too frosty—or too draining—until the polish catches up.