Apple Releases iOS 26.1 and iPadOS 26.1 with accessibility enhancements, new language support for Live Translation, and more

I wanted to clarify something. when Voiceover says "replay" after a message in Messages, it could be because it was sent from Siri, or because it had been edited. the initial post said nothing about that.

I am currently running iOS 18.7 on my iPhone. Is it worth it to upgrade to iOS 26.1, at this time?

Hello,
I put a comment in another thread, here on the site, indicating that I'd tested the issue & it did notb occur on my device.
In that comment, I also requested more info about the types of devices people were using, which exhibited this issue.

Sad this still an issue.

If you sent a message using Siri as recording, Siri ask you if you want to play it, now it does not. Love that and I missed it.

for myself at least, when i plug in my cable to charge voiceover still just states how much battery is in the phone, not how long it has to charge does it not work on the 15 series or lower?

Hi,
I didn’t get the update for iOS 26.1 on my iPhone 16 Pro, but I did get it for my iPad. This is strange.

Same here. 16 pro max.

Hi everyone, I was able to update my iPhone SE third generation to iOS 26.1. However, it will not show up at all on my iPhone 15. He keeps saying that the software is up-to-date. Well, of course it says it now the iOS is up-to-date. I’m hoping in a few more hours it will show up, but right now it’s not showing up at all and I did restart my phone just to make sure that there wasn’t something like that. I called Apple and they just basically said that it’s because the software comes in waves and that everybody can get it all at the same time. I just find out that I was able to get it on my older device and not having it show up at all. I knew one is a little weird. I will update you guys when it does come to my phone to let you know if I find any new changes. One thing that’s positive that changed is that Karen premium is now functioning properly and my iPhone SE which I’m very happy about since she’s my favorite Voice. My iPhone 15 for now I’m using regular Karen so that I can update my phone. Hopefully, I can get premium on that device as well.

I think it's called the today screen. It's the 1 you get if you 3 finger swipe right from the home screen. Anyway, my battery wigits show up just fine, but the wigit for my bank is no longer accessible, at least not according to Voiceover. I tried removing and readding the wigit, but it didn't help. I even switched the position of the bank wigit and the battery wigit, but that didn't help either. The problem started out of nowhere about 2 weeks ago. Before that, I could very easily check my bank balance by going to that screen. Now, no matter how many times I flick right on the battery status wigits, the bank one never shows up. The bank and battery wigits are the only two I have active. Any ideas on how I might be able to get the banking wigit back would be extremely appreciated.

Check with your bank, it might not be accessible on their end.

Hi everyone, just wanted to come back on here and update you all to say that the update did show up on my iPhone 15 and I also did get premium care to work on there too so I’m really happy that Apple fixed that problem. Hopefully all the rest of the voices that people were having issues with in iOS 26.0 fixed now too. I didn’t see any other really major changes. And I’m really happy that my favorite voice is back on both of my devices.

I'm not getting anything either. All I can think of is that it only works if you're charging to 80% which I am not.

I've found that disabling the back button in Braille Access results in the inability to use Space+dots 456 to move to the end of BRF files and the inability to delete BRF files. I'll inform Apple of these bugs.

On the topic of Braille Access, but not related to this iOS update, does anyone know what exactly the setting Hide BRF Page Indicators does? It doesn't suppress page numbers whether they're in the top or bottom right-hand corner, and it doesn't suppress form feed characters. I contacted Apple Accessibility, who weren't very helpful. I'm certainly going to escalate it, but maybe someone else has figured it out.

I was so looking forward to the feature of the estimated charging time! I put the phone to charge (it was at 81%), but no go! What setting needs to be changed for this to work?

If my phone is plugged in, I get the estimated charging time when I press the side button to unlock my screen. It says the time, and then says the estimated charging time. I have not found a way to repeat it. Even throughout the beta cycle, I could not find a way to repeat it. I'm using an iPhone 16 Pro Max.

The high and premium quality voices work again. They show up as downloaded and can be selected.

Best regards,
Daniel

I’m glad this is working for everybody now. This is an example to me of Apple. Definitely listening to us. Cause I called and I noticed the issue that’s why they got. Multiple reports of Voice is not working so this is great news. I’m glad they were able to fix this.

So, notifications and the weather app are not fixed grrrrrrr.

Is anyone still getting bit by the bug with email in the Mail app, where characters typed after pessing the space bar are missed? I've been hobbding off updating because I do not want this bug to bite me, as I rely heavily on email for the volunteer and other work I do as an advocate.

So in the previous release of iOS (26.0.1), either via the 3-finger down from the Status Bar, or with the 3-click downward gesture, sometimes it'd take about 5-6 tries before the Notification area opened up! I'm so relieved to see that in 26.1, this annoyance has apparently been fixed; so far, no more issues when going into the Notification area!

The issue with going into the notification area is still there. What I think it does is fail if for example you have a notification on the screen that you haven't read or it hasn't disappeared automatically. Hard to describe what I mean but next time you have the phone unlocked and you hear the notification sound stating a notification has come in immediately try to go into the notification area. You should find it won't work. As soon as the current notification has disappeared either by itself or you dismissing it then all works again.

Does anybody know how to turn off the haptic for answering ending a phone call? I heard that there was a way to do it, but I couldn’t find it in the settings under the voiceover sounds and haptics? Is it a separate haptic to the ones that are found in the audio settings of voiceover? Thanks.

Go to setting, apps, select phone, and slide down until you see it. Long live cats.

I updated my iPhone 15 yesterday. I love the camera swipe from the lock screen and turned that off. Now I won't have random pictures in my phone. :) lol.

There seems to be no way to stop the alarm. It says slide to stop, but tapping it does nothing with VO on. I just end up snoozing it and telling Siri to turn it off. It is annoying.

There is away to do so, setting, accessibility, touch. I think is there. Long live cats.

Greetings: Settings, Accessibility, Prefer Single-Touch. I tested this, and it works. When the alarm goes off, there is now a Stop button on my iPhone.

So now the side button will not stop the alarm?

The lag when switching between voices by either using the voices rotor or assigned gesture is still present.
Btw, swiping up or down with three fingers in the control centre to move to previous or next page doesn't work either.
And to stop the alarm, you have to swipe up, i.e. perform the home button gesture when the alarm is ringing. And it still works, tested it.

There is other ways to stop it, but it seems like a bug that the button that is labeled slide to stop can't be invoked with Voiceover. It shouldn't require turning on another accessibility setting to use the button. If someone can tell me how to slide to stop, I'll agree its not a bug, but I haven't gotten that to work, even with a double taop and hold, then slide

Hi there everyone, I’m loving the fact that I can find out what the estimation of charge is left to charge up my battery when I plug in the charger. I have the latest version of iOS and iPhone 15 pro. I am very glad that it works. However, does anybody know how to get the call screening To Work when someone calls you and their number is not in your contacts for some reason, I’m still struggling in how to use it and actually reply when someone calls when I don’t know who they are.

Thanks for the person who gave me the answer of how to turn off the haptic setting for an incoming or ending call. You do have to go into the Phone app for that setting. Go to where it says it just says haptics and then you swipe to the right explanation that it’s called that will play a haptic when Nicole is injured or dropped so it’s a toggle switch button and you just turn it off will double tap. So I did that. Thanks I agree cats are amazing. They’re my favorite animal.

You could be right that it's somehow broken on my bank's end. I just know it worked great for years; had to reactivate it from time to time, but even then, the wigit was there, it just wouldn't show my balance. Now, it's gone completely. Perhaps my bank needs to update their app again to fix things. I'll call them when I have time/energy to report the issue.

I have two language keyboards on my iPhone 13 Pro Max, Arabic and English. WHenever I need to type in English the Arabic voice announces the English letters. Such annoyance!

You are welcome. Long live cats.

Hi Dawn. It's still there and also in other places. It's so bad that I have switched to my Mantis whenever I'm also in front of my computer. I'd hold off on upgrading if you do not need any of the features in iOS 26 very badly. I upgraded so that I can use Live Captions. The trade off is pretty rough.

Updated last night. This morning, when my alarm went off, pushed the side button and it stopped just like before. I don't know if it is because I have snooze set to never.

I am not seeing the option for Display & Brightness, Liquid Glass. Is this only on the newer devices? I currently am running iOS 26.1 on my old backup device, an iPhone SE 2020 model. Not my primary.

TIA.

Edit: never mind I found it. I was looking in the accessibility section, rather than the primary settings page. Go figure...

on mine I only got the charge time to 80%. It does not seem to estimate the time till a full charge. Pretty disappointing I don't really find that useful

There is indeed a way of seeing the estimated charging time when the battery is upwards of 80%; yes it's not automatic like below 80%, but nevertheless here's how it's done: Put yourselves atop the "Settings" app icon; double-tap And hold until the submenu pops up, from which you double-tap on Battery. From there, start flicking around, and you'll see estimated charging time at 80%, and another flick or two afterwards, you'll see the estimated charging time up to 100%. Hope this helps some!

Oh jeeze! Thank you for sharing that! I'm sorry your bug bites are itching this bad! :-) ;-) Yes, I'm trying to use a little bit of humor here, because, sometimes we need to laugh a little in the chaos.
I need some of the features, but, I don't need them that bad. I need some of the features, but, I do't need stress, aggravation, etc with my email, I've been there done that.
Thank you for the warning! I was thinking about updating sometime in the next couple weeks. But, I think I'll wait a little longer.

I just updated yesterday, and found the new setting which adjusts the liquid glass. I haven't played around much yet with this update, but thus far I'm having no issues. Even the problem with the alarms/timers seems non-existent for me. I know this because I had an alarm this morning for my exercise class and had absolutely no issues dismissing it.

There’s a bug on iOS 26.1 where Safari shows a pop-up asking you to enter a username to save your password when trying to autofill a login form.

The issue happens even if you already have the username and password saved for that exact website in the Passwords app. Safari still acts like you’re saving a new password and won’t let you continue without entering a username first.

So basically, even with your credentials saved, Safari pops up that “enter username to save password” message every time you visit the site and try to log in.
Device: iPhone 14
iOS version: 26.1
Anybody else ran into this issue? Or can make it occur in other devices like an iPad or Mac?

There’s a Safari accessibility bug that’s been around since iOS 26.0 and is still present in 26.1.

Sometimes when you open the tab viewer to switch between different tabs, the VoiceOver cursor gets stuck in the status bar (where the time, signal, and battery icons are). Once it happens, you can’t move the cursor away from the status bar at all — the only way to fix it is to close Safari completely and reopen it.

It doesn’t happen every time you enter the tab viewer, but it occurs often enough to be noticeable.
Device: iPhone 14

iOS Version: 26.1 (also confirmed on 26.0)

It's incredible that, one minor and one major version of iOS after the but preventing re-enabling the security protection against external USB devices has been reported, Apple is yet to fix it. Essentially when someone disables that security protection, iOS prevents re-enabling it stating that the some company's management settings disabled that option even when the device doesn't have any management profiles, which is the case of my iPhone bought straight from Apple without any management profiles or carrier locks. Even my development profile is not on it yet, and might never actually be since I intend to use my iPad Mini for on-device testing instead.

After jumping from ios 18 to 26.1, the Podcasts app announced that it now allows you to set playback speed per show. This is great as it's the main reason I use other apps.

However... it seems broken. My default speed is 1.8x. If I start a podcast it plays at that speed. If I then start a second episode, it goes back to 1x. As far as I can tell, it is still reporting it as 1.8x. The first time it happened I messed around with the settings a bit, did the hokey kokey, put a handkerchief over my head - you know, the normal VoiceOver stuff. Anyway I somehow got it working again, but not last night. Maybe the app needs to be closed and reopened - I can't remember if I did that last night.

Anyone else experiencing this? I know it's not strictly speaking an accessibility thing, but I reckon most of us use this feature.

A bug is making it somewhat cumbersome to adjust the brightness of the flashlight (or torch, depending on where in the world you are). VoiceOver announces extraneous information for the control, and each time you make an adjustment, focus moves away from the control.

As a side note, when I was running iOS 18, it wasn't possible to adjust flashlight brightness at all on this iPhone, but it was something I was able to do on my previous device.

I mentioned this back during 26.01 if I'm not mistaken. Anyways, for those of us on older devices with touch ID. If you have touch ID set up on iOS 26, and for some reason your device stops recognizing your fingerprint. iOS will no longer allow you to go in and create a new fingerprint, because it requires you to Use touch ID in order to delete and/or replaced fingerprints now. So, I am effectively locked out of adjusting my touch ID settings.

Hello. I've experienced the fill password bug with my paratransit login on Safari. It prompted me to inter my client ID (user name) and password when I already have that info in the passwords app. odd to say the least.