On December 13th, technology media Appleinsider released a blog post summarizing and organizing the update content of Apple's iOS 26.2. Apple has focused on optimizing the "Liquid Glass" design language, adding a lock screen clock transparency adjustment slider, and applying this material to native applications such as "rangefinders".


1、 Deepen the design language of 'liquid glass'

Apple actively polished the "liquid glass" design language based on user feedback, and added a lock screen clock transparency adjustment slider to the system, supporting users to customize the transparency of clock materials.

At the same time, Apple has extended this design language to "rangefinder" and "spirit level" applications, which are now composed of transparent glass like elements and have more dynamic interactive animations. In addition, the editing menu of the photo application and home screen widget adopts a new elastic animation similar to that shown in WWDC 2025, providing a more unified and layered visual experience. 2、 Users with a 30 day temporary access code for air delivery can now enter "Settings>General>AirDrop" to generate a one-time security code with a validity period of up to 30 days. By sharing this code, users can establish temporary AirDrop connections with people who are not in their contact list to transfer files.

This feature solves the limitations of only being able to choose "close", "contacts only" or "open to everyone for 10 minutes" in the past, providing a safer and more convenient solution for temporary file sharing, avoiding the trouble of adding unfamiliar contacts for one-time transfer. 3、 In terms of productivity, Apple has broken down the data barrier between "clock" and "reminder items" by optimizing the clock experience. When creating an "emergency" reminder, users can authorize the application to call the system alarm, ensuring that even in focus mode, critical tasks can reach the user through strong reminder sounds. 4、 The most noteworthy improvement in this update of Podcast 4.1, Automatic Chapter Generation, is the introduction of AI driven "automatic chapter generation" for the first time. Although podcast applications previously supported chapter jumping, all chapter tags required podcast creators to manually add titles and timestamps, which was a cumbersome process. Now, the system can automatically create chapters for single episodes of American English podcasts lasting over 10 minutes and mark them as "Automatically Created". This feature not only greatly reduces the burden on creators, but also allows listeners to navigate and jump through lengthy content more easily. Meanwhile, Apple also reserves control for creators, who can edit or choose to disable this feature in the background. 4.2. Improve the discovery mechanism of podcasts. IT Home cited a blog post stating that Apple has added a "Podcast Mentions" feature. When another podcast is mentioned in a program, the new version of the application will automatically generate a link to the mentioned podcast in the player interface and transcript. Listeners no longer need to manually search or copy program names, they can easily view and follow new podcasts of interest with just one click. This feature effectively solves the information breakpoint in word-of-mouth communication, making the promotion and discovery of high-quality content more seamless and immediate. Creators can also choose whether to enable this automatic linking feature in the Apple Podcasts Connect backend. 4.3. The 'From This Episode' feature addresses a long-standing challenge for listeners: quickly finding relevant links mentioned in podcasts. These links used to be scattered throughout lengthy show notes, making them very inconvenient to find. The new feature integrates all shared links into a dedicated page for a single episode, making it easy for users to access quickly. Furthermore, if the creator provides a timestamp in the link, the link will also be highlighted synchronously with the text record when the podcast reaches the corresponding time point, achieving precise matching between content and resources. 5、 Apple News was originally a pure news application, but with its development in recent years, it has gradually expanded to include multiple vertical sections such as daily puzzle games, food recipes, sports, etc. One of the purposes of this update is to allow users to discover and use increasingly rich non news features. The most obvious change is that the new version of Apple News has added four quick links at the top of the "Today" screen, namely "Sports," "Puzzles," "Politics," and "Food. 6、 Adjusting Sleep Score "is a health feature on the Apple Watch that analyzes your sleep duration, regularity, and interruptions, giving you a score from 0 to 100 to quantify your sleep recovery from the previous night. The higher the score, the better the sleep quality may be. Specifically, the new grading standards have raised the score requirements for each level. For example, the "High" rating that used to be obtained with 70 points needs to reach 81 points under the new standard; Similarly, the threshold for an "OK" rating has been raised from 50 points to 61 points. The old version of the rating standard has a very low rating range of 0-29 points, 0-40 points, 30-49 points, 41-60 points, OK50-69 points, 61-80 points, high 70-89 points, 81-95 points, very high (previously excellent), 90-100 points, 96-100 points. In addition to tightening the score threshold, Apple has also renamed the highest rating from "Excellent" to "Very High". Apple explained that 'very high' is a more objective term than 'excellent', which helps avoid confusion for users due to scores not matching their subjective feelings of the day. 7、 Enhanced gaming features allow users to directly view the games their friends are currently playing, upcoming releases, and real-time activities of their own games within the app. The application also allows users to view, filter, and sort all games downloaded from the App Store in the past. The new version also strengthens the social interaction function, allowing users to directly invite friends to challenge or play real-time multiplayer games from the "Game" application. When a friend breaks your high score record, the system will also send a notification, making it convenient for you to immediately initiate a "counterattack" challenge. 8、 CarPlay provides a small but practical improvement for CarPlay users in iOS 26.2 Beta 2. Apple has added a separate toggle switch for CarPlay, allowing users to decide whether to display fixed iMessage messages on the in car screen. Prior to this, CarPlay would directly synchronize the settings on the iPhone, while the new switch gave users higher customization freedom in car scenarios, meeting privacy and usage needs in different scenarios. 9、 One of the highlights of Japan's open side button update is the adjustment of compliance for specific markets. Due to local regulations, Japanese users can now set the iPhone side button to wake up third-party voice assistants such as Google Gemini or Alexa, and are allowed to install third-party app marketplaces such as AltStore PAL. 10、 Slide Over Return on iPadOS 26.2 Although iPadOS 26.1 attempted to restore the "Slide Over" feature, it only supported calling through menu buttons at the time, resulting in a fragmented experience. IPadOS 26.2 has completely restored the "complete body" of this feature, and users now have the ability to quickly pull applications into side windows through simple drag and drop gestures, greatly improving the coherence and efficiency of operations. Users can currently download and install this version directly through "Settings>General>Software Updates".

On December 13th, technology media Appleinsider released a blog post summarizing and organizing the update content of Apple's iOS 26.2. Apple has focused on optimizing the "Liquid Glass" design language, adding a lock screen clock transparency adjustment slider, and applying this material to native applications such as "rangefinders".


1、 Deepen the design language of 'liquid glass'

Apple actively polished the "liquid glass" design language based on user feedback, and added a lock screen clock transparency adjustment slider to the system, supporting users to customize the transparency of clock materials.

At the same time, Apple has extended this design language to "rangefinder" and "spirit level" applications, which are now composed of transparent glass like elements and have more dynamic interactive animations. In addition, the editing menu of the photo application and home screen widget adopts a new elastic animation similar to that shown in WWDC 2025, providing a more unified and layered visual experience. 2、 Users with a 30 day temporary access code for air delivery can now enter "Settings>General>AirDrop" to generate a one-time security code with a validity period of up to 30 days. By sharing this code, users can establish temporary AirDrop connections with people who are not in their contact list to transfer files.

This feature solves the limitations of only being able to choose "close", "contacts only" or "open to everyone for 10 minutes" in the past, providing a safer and more convenient solution for temporary file sharing, avoiding the trouble of adding unfamiliar contacts for one-time transfer. 3、 In terms of productivity, Apple has broken down the data barrier between "clock" and "reminder items" by optimizing the clock experience. When creating an "emergency" reminder, users can authorize the application to call the system alarm, ensuring that even in focus mode, critical tasks can reach the user through strong reminder sounds. 4、 The most noteworthy improvement in this update of Podcast 4.1, Automatic Chapter Generation, is the introduction of AI driven "automatic chapter generation" for the first time. Although podcast applications previously supported chapter jumping, all chapter tags required podcast creators to manually add titles and timestamps, which was a cumbersome process. Now, the system can automatically create chapters for single episodes of American English podcasts lasting over 10 minutes and mark them as "Automatically Created". This feature not only greatly reduces the burden on creators, but also allows listeners to navigate and jump through lengthy content more easily. Meanwhile, Apple also reserves control for creators, who can edit or choose to disable this feature in the background. 4.2. Improve the discovery mechanism of podcasts. IT Home cited a blog post stating that Apple has added a "Podcast Mentions" feature. When another podcast is mentioned in a program, the new version of the application will automatically generate a link to the mentioned podcast in the player interface and transcript. Listeners no longer need to manually search or copy program names, they can easily view and follow new podcasts of interest with just one click. This feature effectively solves the information breakpoint in word-of-mouth communication, making the promotion and discovery of high-quality content more seamless and immediate. Creators can also choose whether to enable this automatic linking feature in the Apple Podcasts Connect backend. 4.3. The 'From This Episode' feature addresses a long-standing challenge for listeners: quickly finding relevant links mentioned in podcasts. These links used to be scattered throughout lengthy show notes, making them very inconvenient to find. The new feature integrates all shared links into a dedicated page for a single episode, making it easy for users to access quickly. Furthermore, if the creator provides a timestamp in the link, the link will also be highlighted synchronously with the text record when the podcast reaches the corresponding time point, achieving precise matching between content and resources. 5、 Apple News was originally a pure news application, but with its development in recent years, it has gradually expanded to include multiple vertical sections such as daily puzzle games, food recipes, sports, etc. One of the purposes of this update is to allow users to discover and use increasingly rich non news features. The most obvious change is that the new version of Apple News has added four quick links at the top of the "Today" screen, namely "Sports," "Puzzles," "Politics," and "Food. 6、 Adjusting Sleep Score "is a health feature on the Apple Watch that analyzes your sleep duration, regularity, and interruptions, giving you a score from 0 to 100 to quantify your sleep recovery from the previous night. The higher the score, the better the sleep quality may be. Specifically, the new grading standards have raised the score requirements for each level. For example, the "High" rating that used to be obtained with 70 points needs to reach 81 points under the new standard; Similarly, the threshold for an "OK" rating has been raised from 50 points to 61 points. The old version of the rating standard has a very low rating range of 0-29 points, 0-40 points, 30-49 points, 41-60 points, OK50-69 points, 61-80 points, high 70-89 points, 81-95 points, very high (previously excellent), 90-100 points, 96-100 points. In addition to tightening the score threshold, Apple has also renamed the highest rating from "Excellent" to "Very High". Apple explained that 'very high' is a more objective term than 'excellent', which helps avoid confusion for users due to scores not matching their subjective feelings of the day. 7、 Enhanced gaming features allow users to directly view the games their friends are currently playing, upcoming releases, and real-time activities of their own games within the app. The application also allows users to view, filter, and sort all games downloaded from the App Store in the past. The new version also strengthens the social interaction function, allowing users to directly invite friends to challenge or play real-time multiplayer games from the "Game" application. When a friend breaks your high score record, the system will also send a notification, making it convenient for you to immediately initiate a "counterattack" challenge. 8、 CarPlay provides a small but practical improvement for CarPlay users in iOS 26.2 Beta 2. Apple has added a separate toggle switch for CarPlay, allowing users to decide whether to display fixed iMessage messages on the in car screen. Prior to this, CarPlay would directly synchronize the settings on the iPhone, while the new switch gave users higher customization freedom in car scenarios, meeting privacy and usage needs in different scenarios. 9、 One of the highlights of Japan's open side button update is the adjustment of compliance for specific markets. Due to local regulations, Japanese users can now set the iPhone side button to wake up third-party voice assistants such as Google Gemini or Alexa, and are allowed to install third-party app marketplaces such as AltStore PAL. 10、 Slide Over Return on iPadOS 26.2 Although iPadOS 26.1 attempted to restore the "Slide Over" feature, it only supported calling through menu buttons at the time, resulting in a fragmented experience. IPadOS 26.2 has completely restored the "complete body" of this feature, and users now have the ability to quickly pull applications into side windows through simple drag and drop gestures, greatly improving the coherence and efficiency of operations. Users can currently download and install this version directly through "Settings>General>Software Updates".