When Apple announced a great overhaul of the iPhone camera application in iOS 26 in June, I was very happy. The current application in iOS 18 is a confusing mess, so an overhaul has been expected for a long time – and I recently tested the new camera application in the public beta version iOS 26.
As an animal of Techradar cameras editor, I lived more than my fair share of boring interfaces. And although Apple’s current camera application is far from the worst offender, it looks very much like my garden hangar – with several years of congestion combined without real attempt at organization.
Well, the good news is that Apple definitively wrapped its sleeves and attacked this overhaul with delight. The application of the camera is very different, so much so that you will initially wonder where it is stored everything. Overall, I would call it success so far, but with some reservations …
Tastes
1. Clean minimalism
First of all, the good news – the new camera application in iOS 26 is much cleaner and simpler than the old in iOS 18.
There are now fewer buttons to be accidentally supported and the consistency of the liquid glass overhaul makes it more coherent and less confusing.
To help reduce accidental valves, Apple has opened more space around the trigger. Fortunately, the shutter always supports its usual shortcuts – hold and slide on the right to film the video, or maintain and slide on the left for the burst mode. Funny fact: Did you know that the latter is called Quicktake, after Apple’s forgotten digital camera?
But perhaps the largest improvement compared to the old camera application is the new liquid glass menus …
My least favorite feature of the current camera application is its camera control menu. This is the one you open by pressing the confusing shortcut arrow at the top of the screen, or by sliding anywhere in the viewfinder.
Fortunately, Apple gave a complete overhaul. No more the small horizontal row of hieroglyphs for features such as photographic styles and night mode.
Now, when you slide up from the bottom of the screen, you get a much clearer option (housed inside the liquid glass, naturally) with labels for each. It’s much better.
Unfortunately, the other big minimalist change – simple photo and video tabs – is slightly less successful, but more about it in the aversions …
I tend to take more photos and videos on my iPhone, but I have always been frustrated by the delicate video settings menu in the iOS camera application.
Fortunately, this has now been corrected in iOS 26. Rather than having to press the resolution or frequency of images several times to scroll through the options, you now get the improved liquid glass panel above.
As in photo mode, you can slide up to access separate video options (flash, exposure and action mode), which are now easier to understand at a glance. The video experience is still very simple compared to the final apple camera application of Apple, but it makes sense for an experience of point and shot.
The aversions
1. The new navigation bar
In theory, I like the simplicity of the new navigation bar at the bottom of the iOS 26 camera application. This starts with visible video and photo options. To reveal the other modes – Timelapse, Slo -Mo, Cinematographic, Portrait and Pano, to name them all – you simply sweep to the left or right.
But some of the niggles gave him a learning curve. First, the default scroll adjustment sees both the liquid glass switch and the navigation bar behind it moves simultaneously, which is a little disorienting. It is also difficult to see the options under your thumb.
Fortunately, in recent Betas, Apple added a new option in the camera settings in a section called fashion switching, where you will find a rocking for “classic fashion switching”. This makes it behave more like the previous camera application, where you slide the wheel directly, while the rocking remains central.
Hopefully this happens to the final version of the camera application. At first, I also found it difficult to see the navigation bar options under my thumb, but I discovered that you can always scroll them by sliding the screen instead. Although minimalism is an improvement overall, I think that some will initially be disconcerted and will find more difficult to choose some of the photo and video modes.
2. The absence of a pro mode
I hope to see a professional camera mode coming on iPhones for a few years now, but iOS 26 has firmly went in the other direction. Does that potentially open the door to a photo equivalent of the apple free final camera application for video? Perhaps, but there is no sign of one of them either.
To be fair, some of the best camera applications like Halide, Procamera and Camera obscura fill more than in a suitable way of this gap, and Apple may be wary to make them ring-that is to say that Apple kills a popular application by creating functionality in its own software.
But if we have a simple liquid glass rocking for video and photo, why can’t there be one for basic and pro photo modes? It would be much easier than changing applications for something like manual focus, and would transform the iPhone into an even better rival to the best compact cameras.
This still does not seem likely, so for the moment the best alternative is to configure your iPhone camera application with some of the useful tools hidden in the settings menu. I generally turn on the grid and the level, I choose Apple Proraw in the Formats section, and I also go to keep the parameters to activate the camera mode and the setting of the exposure so that my iPhone behaves more like a camera.
But for more settings, see my guide on how to configure your iPhone 16 (or older model) to take superb photos.
