Apple’s latest iOS update, available for eligible devices starting Monday, doesn’t introduce any major features, but it does bring one highly requested tweak: the ability to change the transparency of the translucent liquid glass design.
If you didn’t like the look of iOS 26, all you could do so far was to reduce transparency via the accessibility settings, which pretty much turned off the liquid glass overlay. With iOS 26.1, we now get a new menu to retain the look while increasing opacity.
You can head to Settings > Display & Brightness > Liquid Glass to select either the original “Clear” option or a more opaque “Tinted” option. You can also see a preview of each option when you’re selecting them.
Liquid glass was the company’s biggest design overhaul since its move to a flat design back in 2013, but similar to most changes of this scale and significance, not everybody has been on board.
Some people said the more translucent design made various parts of the interface harder to read, including notifications or navigation controls in apps, while others professed their love for the attention to detail and the new look, which felt like a much-needed update to an interface that had grown stale over the years. Image Credits:TechCrunch (screenshot)
Besides the transparency settings, iOS 26.1 lets you tweak what gestures do on the home screen: You now get an option to open the camera app by swiping to the left on the lock screen. You change this by going to Settings > Camera > Lock Screen Swipe to Open Camera.
In addition, iOS 26.1 gives users the ability to locally capture audio and video while recording a video call. This can be useful if you’re recording a call or podcast on the move. The company announced this feature for iPadOS in June during the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Techcrunch event Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector. Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector. San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026 WAITLIST NOW
The update also brings support for eight new languages for Apple Intelligence: Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Portuguese (Portugal), Vietnamese, and Turkish. The company is also adding live translation support for five new languages: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Italian, Japanese, and Korean.
We also get some quality-of-life improvements, including gestures to change songs in Apple Music; a slider to stop alarms instead of a button so you don’t accidentally shut it off; and an option to automatically install security improvements.
You can update your device by going to Settings > General > Software update.
Topics Apple, Apps, ios 26, liquid glass Ivan Mehta Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web.
You can contact or verify outreach from Ivan by emailing im@ivanmehta.com or via encrypted message at ivan.42 on Signal. View Bio December 3, 2025 Palo Alto, CA
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