Your iPhone will screen calls for you with iOS 26 coming later this year

There’s going to be a lot of hate in the comments this week as news of Apple’s latest Operating System for the iPhone come out. I can already see them all in my minds eye. At their Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, held at the company’s Apple Park headquarters new versions of the software running on all Apple devices were announced.

Critically, the version numbers for all these platforms switch to 26, so iPhones will get iOS 26 later this year.

The event leaned well into Apple’s investment in the upcoming F1 movie – with the opening “film” themed around the movie, showing Software VP Craig Federighi driving the APXGP “F1 Car” around the roof of the iconic “ring” building.

Fun aside, Apple had to address the concerns of market observers around their failure to deliver some components of their AI capabilities within “Apple Intelligence”. Federighi described what we’ve seen thus far as the “First steps on a journey to bring your intelligence that’s most useful and relevant to you”. But, went onto mention the undelivered features saying “This work needed more time to reach a high quality bar” suggesting more would be shared in the year ahead

It’s an admission that they failed to deliver, but it doesn’t discount the many AI features that do exist on Apple products. In fact, I’d argue Apple leant into those features as useful and usable, rather than “just for show”.

For developers, Apple is opening up access to the Large Language Model for AI on the device, which means an app can use AI without drawing on cloud resources or needing additional cost. An example was the use of AI to analyse your own study notes and use the Kahoot app to build a quiz that is based entirely on your study.

But, other than the numbering change, the biggest change coming to iPhones later this year is the overall “look” of iOS.

A new “Liquid Glass” style is described by Apple as their “broadest design update ever”.

Imagine a clear glass style to text, to pop up boxes and menus. This transparency is not new to Apple software, or other software – frankly, it’s about as a big a design leap as Windows Vista’s “Aero” style was to Windows.

But it will look different.

Lot’s of responsiveness to the layout of icons and menus, for example the address bar in Safari gets smaller when scrolling, and now sits over the content in this glass and transparent style

In a subtle “mea culpa”, Apple has redesigned the Photos app once again, after some backlash from the changes in iOS 18, the “Library” is back, with “Collections” more like the iOS 18 style.

For those using their iPhone to power their infotainment in the car, CarPlay also gets this redesigned style, but some new features. Like a smaller pop up for incoming calls, the ability to “tap back” to messages, and even use Widgets in your CarPlay dashbaord.

The Phone App gets an overhaul, with a new floating menu at the bottom, but pinned contacts at the top – it looks more like the messages app now, and might be a bit jarring for some.

Perhaps the most welcome features will be ones that Android Users will call out as “we’ve had that for years”.

Call Screening for example, allows you to send unknown calls off to be screened, and once you know who’s calling and why, you can take the call.

Messages too are going to be screened to make that message list a bit cleaner and move unwanted stuff to a simple to access, but hidden list of it’s own.

Speaking of been there done that, Samsung will be giggling in the corner today, as Apple releases Live Translate for calls and messages, something Samsung did two years ago.

And, there’s new options for Visual Intelligence. Basically, screenshots are now a way to search the web or your favourite apps for an image you captured on screen.

iOS 26 will work on iPhone 11 through to the upcoming iPhone 17, and will be available later this year – likely mid September.

Trevor Long travelled to California as a guest of Apple