iOS 26.2 fixes 20 security vulnerabilities, 2 actively exploited

Wow. I'm still on 18.7.1, saw the update to 18.7.2 yesterday (100% sure on this), but didn't want to install it at that moment as I needed the phone, and deferred the update to today.

Now I don't see any iOS 18 updates at all, only the iOS 26 prompts. What a dick move, Apple. Especially if this is a) a security update, and b) iOS 26 is known to run poorly on older phones like mine.

Thanks for the workaround!

If your phone is laggy after liquid glass, Enabling "Reduce Motion" from Accessibility/Motion makes my 2020 iphone se much better. You can also disable transparency for even more frames, but it makes some UIs look particularly bad (because everything is transparent in frutiger aero/liquid glass)

Getting an iPhone model that comes with iOS 26 and cannot be downgraded: what a blunder. It’s not about Liquid Glass per se, more the ability to use your phone without being distracted by constant visual glitches and impaired keyboard typing experience.

You're right. This worked for me. I'm now offered 18.7.3 and wasn't before.

It is also available as a public beta, which you can register for at https://beta.apple.com/

Thank you! Done. Here's hoping they continue to give v18 sec updates until v26+ UX and perf are fixed...

It’s available as a public beta, no need for a developer account.

I would say it's almost certainly a mistake or some side-effect of their system that rolls out updates where they don't happen exactly simultaneously.

Remember that Apple is also pushing that update out to serve their iPhones that cannot get iOS 26. Even if I was to maximize my cynicism, I don't think they presently use security point releases in the manner you are describing.

Unfortunately they have other ways to deprecate your device: App Stores won't work, apps won't talk to their backend with older versions or just straight up won't launch. Even Homebrew stopped supporting my 2015 Macbook I have for personal use.

Like my brother printer's software. It kept pestering me to apply updates, and when I did, my non-genuine cartridges stopped working. So, never update the printer's software.

> I assume others as well

Running iOS 17.6.1 on my iPhone 13 mini right now. I've got a backup iPhone 13 mini new in the box with the factory OS still installed (just in case).

I'm hoping my devices can hold out longer than Apple can remain irrational.

> And the really obnoxious part is that they force you to receive upgrade prompts every single day and you can't disable it

Enable iOS 18 Developer Beta and the nag screens go away.

> It's unfortunate that Apple has taught me (and I assume others as well) over the last 15 years that the best practice is to never install a major OS update.

The sole reason I migrated from Android to Apple was to receive security upgrades for years not months. I am genuinely baffled by the take here on HN. People will (rightly) get up in arms about minor security issues across numerous domains then talk about never updating their phone. That has literally their entire life on it.

Apple users not updating major OSes goes back to the 90s with System 7. It's a seemingly weird habit that some formed even as exposure to vulnerabilities increased.

That's a totally reasonable practice, I would say x.2 releases are mostly fine and have the rough edges polishes.

> It seems clear to me that they use OS updates as a way to eventually slow your device down

This sounds like an exaggeration of what happens after an upgrade: iOS has to re-index your entire phone for Spotlight, etc. Same thing for Photos if there have been changes.

Depending on which phone and the amount of storage, your phone can feel kind of sluggish for a while until the background indexing is done.

If you update before you go to sleep, your device will be fine in the morning.

I literally went out and bought the latest iPhone after my 4.5 years old, perfectly working iPhone 12 was forced to update to iOS 26.2 overnight, and next day was not usable anymore. It turned so slow that I went to an apple store and bought the latest.

Software that doesn't allow you to downgrade should be just as much a no-no as software that doesn't have Undo functionality.

Your theory is real but its not the main purpose, it’s a happy accident for Apple. Otherwise there’d be a class action.

There appears to be a dark pattern occurring where the Tahoe update is selected by default and you need to uncheck it to just install the security update.

How can I install iOS 18.7.3? The settings app only shows 26.2 which I do not want to install.

Do you happen to have an app on this list open (https://avarayr.github.io/shamelectron/) ?

There is a bug in Electron caused by the use of a private API that slows down macOS 26 significantly. It’s fixed in Electron but not all Electron apps have updated to the new version yet. Apparently it’s fixed in macOS 26.2

They do it on purpose and they're being very blatant about it now

Someone will maybe come along and tell you it's just "indexing" slowing it down and to wait a few weeks lol. That's the common gaslighting method

They roll out critical security updates immediately. Either through the app, or RSR fixes.

Then they have more or less monthly security updates, and bundle some into minor releases to not force too many updates which require rebooting.

See discussion elsewhere in this thread on updating to 15.7.3:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46264741

> You will not think about liquid glass after a day, especially if you turn on the new options.

I wouldn’t say so. The “Increase Contrast” and “Show Borders” accessibility options make liquid glass just bearable to me, but the new UI design is still ungracefully buggy and unnecessarily hard(er) to use. (See e.g. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/liquid-glass/ for a detailed discussion.)

Sure, life goes on. However, considering the price tag of an iPhone/iPad, I understand how iOS 26 is off-putting to so many people – despite all the other new features.

I notice it all the damn time.

- If I scroll a web page, and then decide to close it, I have to wait 'til the browser finishes scrolling the page before it'll open the menu with the close button

- every single time I watch a video my eye is drawn to the fucking stupid glass-y diffraction patterns and away from the content I was watching, or the play/pause icon I was interacting with

- every single time I use the home screen on iOS, or CMD+tab in macOS, my eye is drawn to the glass-y highlights around the icons, distracting me from whatever I was trying to do and causing me to think about the OS (and how much I hate the new look)

- I keep noticing the stupidly wide rounded corners on apps

- I keep noticing how the glassy icons and controls and stuff don't consistently change color with dark/light mode. They sometimes change if the content behind them is light/dark (which you'd think is a contrast improvement but it wouldn't be necessary if they had boxed out the toolbars like before). Often half the buttons have changed to contrast with the background and half haven't. This makes all the icons harder to read because I have to interpret the whole set to work out why it's suddenly slightly confusing

- I keep noticing how the toolbar icons have this insane shadows making them appear about 5meters closer to my face than the rest of the scree, which pulls my attention away from whatever I was looking at

- I keep noticing how some icons have those annoying highlighted edges and some don't and wondering why that is, and if they'll all come in sync...

- ... and the glassy-highlighted icons look like shit because the highlights are all the same (same color, same angle, same spread around the edges of the icons), which wouldn't happen if they were actual physical things under natural illumination

- since iOS 26.2, the increase contrast and reduce transparency modes have got worse: they seriously mess with the colors, in many case the light/dark relationship is inverted from what would be most useful (I can't think of examples now - it was so annoying I actually switched back to glassy to allow my eye a sense of comfort when using the thing, and now I try to put up with the "eye candy" distractions instead). I used to have "increase contrast" turned on with the last several major iOS versions. The new scheme has made it slightly harder to use the phone.

And I'm not even getting to how everything is harder to read, harder to see. It's _dreadful_ and they should fire everyone from the C-level who signed it off downwards.

I definitely still notice the (inconsistent? Only occasional? Which makes it even worse) parts of my UI that now look like something from a circa 2001 Java (specifically—not flash, it’s the “cool” Java aesthetic of the time with its image blurring and filtering an such, not the differently-bad “cool” flash aesthetic) applet gfx-heavy web site menu.

Plus there’s the pile of outright visual bugs and glitches. Like my keyboard opening with one size, then after a moment resizing itself a few pixels narrower because it initially rendered a little too big and off center to the right, like a badly-designed webpage. Every single time I open it. Including to write and edit this comment.

I also notice that I had to turn a bunch of accessibility features on so I wouldn’t constantly see animations with tons of dropped frames making me feel like I’m playing a bad port of a 3D PlayStation 2 game on a Gameboy Advance.

I installed iPadOS 26 specifically for the new windowing features. I like the glass look as a concept. But the actual implementation of it is total dogshit. I cannot go a day without seeing the OS render black-on-black or white-on-white text, especially in the status indicators at the top of the device. There are so many little things regarding automatic color contrast in UIKit that are just poorly thought out or broken.

The thing is, Liquid Glass is already using a shader to render the refraction effect on top of the other UI layers. But - at least from my own developer experiments - it doesn't actually use anything graphical to determine what background color it needs to contrast against[1]. Instead, it looks through the view hierarchy for a view on the same edge as the toolbar the widget is in, and then grabs some undocumented[0] property from that view to determine its background. This fails if there's a split. Build, say, a toolbar layout and put two views inside of it, split 50% vertically with one having a black background and the other white. Put items in your toolbar on both left and right sides. They will either be all black or all white, only contrasting with half the screen.

[0] Or, at least, I have yet to find out what this property is.

[1] Hell, for icons and text they could XOR the alpha mask with the underlying pixels, or a blurred version thereof, to make text that will always contrast.

On work devices I've been using iOS 26 since early betas and macOS 26 for a few weeks now, and I still think about the user experience degradation. On the bright side — it makes me appreciate iOS 18 and macOS 15 more.

At this point I'm not contorting myself into skipping an update; I'm looking at exiting the entire Apple ecosystem. I don't want Liquid Glass to be my computing experience for the next numerous years.

Exactly. I don’t even notice it.

Which new options do you mean?

There are plenty of examples of software with year-based version numbers that are released in the Fall prior to that year.