Not Ready for Apple iOS 26

The long anticipated official iOS 26 is out and available for millions of iPhone users worldwide. Like rest of the iPhone users, I have been waiting for this upgrade for quite sometime now. I have spent countless hours over the last couple of weeks reading and watching the videos of beta testers. It looked so amazing and I just could not wait any longer to upgrade my device with the latest update. So, when it was released today I did not hesitate to upgrade it on my iPhone 12 mini. Yeah, iPhone 12. Go ahead and judge me.

Right after the upgrade, when my device booted for the first time to home screen, I was super excited. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm did not last for long. I went straight to the settings and it took few seconds to load the settings window. That few seconds seemed much longer than whatever it took when I had iOS 18.6.2. When the window showed up, I could see the text but I could see the smaller icons on the left hand side. Yeah, that took few more additional seconds to load. I closed the settings window and then came back to the same window again. This time the icon loaded a bit faster but window was still a bit laggy. My heart sank right there.

The home screen looked sharp and clear. The translucent sections looked great but most of the window and pop ups remained a bit sluggish. I got 64GB version iPhone and when I performed the upgrade, it had around 38GB of free space. You can imagine, I did not had that many application installed on my device. No game whatsoever. Yet, the phone felt a bit slower than what I expected. After using to for few more additional minutes, I was freaking out so bad that I decided to roll back right away. After all this is my phone, not a testing device.

After performing so many iOS updates over the years, my phone never felt so much slower. I just could not be happy. I ended up rolling back to iOS 18.6.2 and the upgrade it to 18.7. The phone seems quite stable and I do not see any more issues right now. I wanted to upgrade the iOS 26 on my iPad 5 and iPad 6 mini. Specially iPad 6 mini seemed to have better hardware specs so I thought of performing the upgrade on that device. Somehow, I felt like I should not waste anymore time with this.

As of right now, I am more than happy with iOS 18.7 and most probably I would have to wait a bit longer until I get my hands on newer device. Unfortunately, that won't be happening anytime soon. So, I am pretty much stuck at this point without any rescue in sight. Perhaps, I am just not ready for iOS 26.