Following Tuesday's event, new Liquid Glass icons for Apple Store, Clips, GarageBand, iMovie, Keynote, Numbers, and Pages have surfaced on Apple's iPhone tech spec pages. The new icons appear on the iPhone 16 tech specs page despite that model having no hardware changes, and existing users will presumably see the new icons in app updates that will roll out on Monday alongside iOS 26.
iOS 26 icons
These apps come preinstalled on new iPhones but they were not included in the iOS 26 betas and release candidate because they are updated through the App Store. While the spec sheets themselves don't reveal changes beyond the usual pre-installed and downloadable apps, the iconography is unmistakably updated to the latest iOS design set based around Liquid Glass.
Most of the updates are relatively subtle with changes largely limited to the glassiness of the design elements, while a few like Clips and GarageBand have a bit more substantial changes.
iOS 18 icons
Perhaps notably, there is inconsistency across Apple's product pages. While every iPhone model page displays these new icons, all Mac product pages continue to show the current macOS versions of these app icons.
We are not expecting Mac hardware updates until later this year, or more likely early 2026, but with macOS Tahoe being released alongside iOS 26 on Monday, we should see the Liquid Glass app icons coming to Apple's App Store apps for Mac as well.
Friday January 9, 2026 8:17 am PST by Tim Hardwick
2026 could be a bumper year for Apple's Mac lineup, with the company expected to announce as many as four separate MacBook launches. Rumors suggest Apple will court both ends of the consumer spectrum, with more affordable options for students and feature-rich premium lines for users that seek the highest specifications from a laptop.
Below is a breakdown of what we're expecting over the next ...
Thursday January 8, 2026 2:56 am PST by Tim Hardwick
Apple's iPhone development roadmap runs several years into the future and the company is continually working with suppliers on several successive iPhone models at the same time, which is why we often get rumored features months ahead of launch. The iPhone 18 series is no different, and we already have a good idea of what to expect for the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max.
One thing worth...
Friday January 9, 2026 4:24 am PST by Tim Hardwick
The Unicode Consortium has published a draft list of emoji that could come to smartphones and other devices in the future. The list shared by Emojipedia outlines 19 emoji candidates under consideration for Emoji 18.0, which is expected to be finalized in September 2026.
Among the proposed additions are a squinting face emoji, left- and right-pointing thumb gestures, a pickle, a lighthouse, a ...
Friday January 9, 2026 10:08 am PST by Eric Slivka
Back in late 2022 and early 2023, Apple rolled out a new architecture for its Apple Home platform to deliver improved performance and compatibility, although the rollout came with some hiccups that forced Apple to pull and later re-release the upgrade.
Three years later, Apple is now on the verge of ending support for the old version of the Home architecture, which may result in access to...
In a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, U.S. Senators Ron Wyden, Ben Ray Lujan, and Edward Markey have requested that Apple and Google remove X Corp's X and Grok apps from their app stores over recent incidents of "mass generation of nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children."
X has come under fire over the past week amid reports of Grok's AI image...
iOS 26 is showing unusually slow adoption among iPhone users months after release, according to third-party analytics.
Usage data published by StatCounter (via Cult of Mac) for January 2026 indicates that only around 15 to 16% of active iPhones worldwide are running any version of iOS 26. The breakdown shows iOS 26.1 accounting for approximately 10.6% of devices, iOS 26.2 for about 4.6%, and ...
Friday January 9, 2026 3:37 am PST by Tim Hardwick
The iPhone Fold will be the first Apple device to adopt a Samsung-made OLED technology called CoE (Color Filter on Encapsulation), which could make the display brighter and thinner than previous panels, reports The Elec.
In a traditional OLED panel, a polarizing film sits above the display to cut reflections and improve contrast. The drawback is that this film also absorbs some of the OLED's ...
I wish we would have transitioned to the icons used on Macs instead, they had some depth to them, and certain icons had elements that escaped the square.
I wish we would have transitioned to the icons used on Macs instead, they had some depth to them, and certain icons had elements that escaped the square.
iOS 26 icons
iOS 18 icons
