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iOS 26.3 and macOS 26.3 Fix Dozens of Vulnerabilities, Including Zero-Day
by akyuu
I hope they release a version of these fixes on iOS 18 in a form installable on an iPhone 14; I've been trying to stay away from Liquid Glass until it's actually usable. I really don't want to be forced to upgrade, since Apple seems to have replaced UX testing with "just ship it," as has become standard in the industry.
Liquid Glass looks pretty from a distance, but my biggest gripe with the design language is just how difficult so many things become to read or interact with. Given that the whole raison d'être of liquid glass is transparent effects, the options to limit that or otherwise increase contrast simply do not go far enough. I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable.
My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.
My biggest frustrations with it aren't even related to the look of things, its the all around disregard for user experience. The new screenshot UX on iOS is an insanely bad downgrade.
Just go to Settings > General > Screen Capture, and turn off Full-Screen Previews - which fully restores the previous behaviour.
Personally I prefer the new behaviour.
But eitherways: it’s just an option.
I think it makes sense. They refocused it on sharing or extracting information from screenshots. Which is what people want more than saving them to the camera roll. Being able to copy text or translate the text in a screenshot is super useful.
> “My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.”
I’m optimistic that they will eventually course correct on Liquid Glass, but we’ll have to wait until iOS/macOS 27, or perhaps longer.
There are parallels to Apple’s butterfly keyboard fiasco on the hardware side. Sleek looking on the surface but an objective step backwards in usability. Unfortunately it took Apple several years to reverse course on that one.
> There are parallels to Apple’s butterfly keyboard fiasco on the hardware side.
There are also parallels with the original pinstripes-and-transparency-everywhere aqua UI. I am also optimistic that it will be toned down over time but retaining the responsiveness.
Whatever happened to the magic bar?
The SD card slot on macbooks … not to mention the HDMI slot.
Here’s hoping that the glass effect goes the same way as the Dodo.
What was the Windows Vista thing, right? It was pretty bad but nobody bought a windows laptop because they thought it’d look nice.
The Windows ME/Fisher Price look. I can get past the drag handle problem. It's like every window is now the damn ios simulator.
They almost certainly will course-correct in the next release now that the culprit responsible for Liquid Glass is no longer at the company. But they won't chuck it out wholesale; it will be a gradual evolution back to sanity.
They reacted pretty quickly to the butterfly keyboard fiasco. By the time users received the shipping products of the first gen, the second gen were already in the pipeline so there was a slightly modified with only a dust cover being added. There was no third gen.
Hopefully iOS 26.x releases will continue to correct Liquid Glass, but I'm guessing iOS 27 is well down the path with it still integrated. Maybe iOS 28 will see sanity return???
Second gen butterfly keyboard broke a lot too. And then there was the no-esc touch bar, and the removal of inverted-T arrow keys... It took a few years of no good mac laptops before they backpedalled enough to get back to where they started
I’m pretty sure butterfly keyboard was made worse when it came to the hotter rubbing higher power Mac’s. I rarely saw folks with the original 12” low power model having issues.
It was not an entirely bad concept for the device it was conceived for, but Apple has a habit of unifying their technologies to all their products and sometimes, like with Liquid Glass, that seriously doesn’t work.
Yes, some suckers bought the second gen with the dust cover. Because they said the keys are more protected from dust.
It started to break in 3 months, had unusable keys in 6...
Stop defending that idiocy.
Quickly, as measured in a few years.
> I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable.
I mean, "computing power" in a literal sense maybe, but does that matter if it doesn't translate to either "workload contention" or "electrical power"?
I think the Liquid Glass effects, similar to smooth scrolling, are mostly just running as pixel shaders on a spare tile of one of the SoC's GPU's Streaming Processors — a tile that likely likely would have been idle-but-burning-power-anyway, given that GPU power management occurs on the level of entire SPs. It's the same reason that ProMotion "smooth viewport scrolling" doesn't really cost anything.
Workload contention. My iPhone 17 visibly struggles to render components with evident lagging - this is user-noticeable, if it were all done by an otherwise spare core I wouldn’t notice these things.
AFAICT, the steady-state Liquid Glass effects (think: the address bar in Safari, staying static itself while you scroll the page under it) cost nothing. That's what I meant above.
Animating the Liquid Glass widgets (i.e. changing their position or shape), on the other hand, does seem to cost a lot / produce lag.
I get the impression that this is down to the UI toolkit not being optimized for whatever Liquid Glass is doing in terms of recalculating constraints during animations. (When the GPU overruns its time budget while computing shaders for the compositor, the visual effect is of [double-buffered] texture buffers dropping/repeating frames, not slowdown. Actual "lag" in a GPU-composited UI is either from CPU work, or from one-shot CUDA-type GPU "prerender jobs".)
I get the sense that Apple rushed out some shitty code that has some of these components re-evaluating a bunch of their placement and sizing constraints on every non-static animation frame (rather than just giving the Liquid Glass shaders the ability to do declarative tweens.)
Or maybe the shaders already do declarative tweens, but Apple are doing tons of redundant on-CPU per-frame recalculations, to re-do any constraint-based layout for everything around the component during the animation, that might be impacted by the component's current tweened state. I dunno.
Either way, it's definitely silly, and could be re-engineered to work a lot better.
But it's also not really "Liquid Glass's fault" (i.e. something inherent to the visual design); it's just (AFAICT) bad implementation engineering, rushed to give Apple something to talk about besides its failure to launch Apple Intelligence.
It's a very complicated system. Performance issues are bad but they're not necessarily caused by how the UI looks.
You can report an issue by typing applefeedback:// into Safari if you want.
lol. No. This has been widely reported in mainstream media. The phones sluggishness has wasted enough of my time, I’m not pouring more of it in a feedback black hole.
"Widely reported in mainstream media" is not a reproducible bug report with logging.
Are AI agents able to use that feedback Url? Apparently they can now open back accounts, so providing feedback must surely be possible.
And even if they reserved a core, that would be a waste of a perfectly good core
> I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable
Sounds like you need to spend some money for a new Apple device! /s
I immediately enabled “reduce transparency” and “strong contrast” in the accessibility settings and didn’t really notice much difference to 18 then. Not a big deal at all.
Reduced transparency is somewhat ugly (the giant bars on the top and bottom of the screen in the web browser for example. But it isn’t obviously awful like the giant transparency thing.
I use Orion Browser and don’t know what you are referring to.
Oh, interesting. Safari just turns the areas that would be transparent solid, instead.
They won't, it already didn't happen for 18.7.4 and 18.7.3 (only via beta channel for the latter), and the present fixes are being released as 18.7.5 for the iPhone XS/XR. Still I think that staying on iOS 18 is the lesser evil.
Updated my 13 mini. Performance is fine / maybe better.. but battery. Tanked. How true is the ‘it takes days for reindexing’ statement?
Re-indexing does occur after an update, but iOS 26 consumes more battery life than iOS 18 anyways.
Just in one example video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eCUkYJ8A98 ) they see the phone get hotter and the battery drops 13x faster during non-static sequences like checking notifications, etc.
Just anecdotally, my iPhone 16 Pro seems to last half as long. Before iOS 16, I got from 80% to 20% without a problem. Now, I charge to 100% and I still need to recharge throughout the day. Apple simply fucked up our phones.
Planned Obsolescence. Increased battery consumption = reduced battery life + user hostile repairability = new purchases. I've seen so many iDiots purchase a new iPhone when their battery conks out because the cost of repairs and original battery "doesn't justify it".
ios 26 has made my 13 mini consistently laggier and hotter
Same. I would’ve stayed on 18.x if they provided updates.
I recommend installing liquid glass on iOS. It actually has been looking good on there since 26.2. Macs have been godawful with liquid glass.
Is that not 18.7.5 as released yesterday or am I missing something?
Apple used to make minor and patch releases available, but they've stopped doing that so as to increase Liquid Glass adoption. For that reason, iOS 18.7.5 is only available for the iPhone XS / XR series released.
Very consumer-hostile behavior from Apple :(
Massively hostile. They have effectively forced me to choose between a less secure phone or one with a terrible UX.
FWIW I’m sticking with the less secure one that doesn’t look like Windows Vista.
> Available for: iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR, iPad 7th generation
They are explicitly choosing to only release security updates for 18.x to devices which are not eligible for liquid glass.
iPhone 14 was deemed capable of running liquid glass, even though it has worse battery life and performs sluggishly.
In the past, Apple has usually let you hold back on an older version and shipped security updates for all devices, not just ones that are incapable of running the new OS, but not this time.
Looks like this is for older devices only. “Available for: iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR, iPad 7th generation” so doesn’t include iPhone 16… nor is available on my device.
Doesn't look like it. It looks like it's only iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR
iOS Liquid Glass needs its own Snow Leopard.
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"100% usable" is an exaggeration that doesn't describe Apple's Liquid Glass. iOS 26 is still very rough and it's still not in a release-appropriate state.
Just for one instance, bug I ran into a few hours ago (persisting in 26.3!) is that, sometimes, you can't even open the lock screen. It just wiggles.
The performance continues to be very poor, rendering far below the 120fps target that iOS 18 hit consistently. This persists with 26.3.
It’s been fine for me, I have been running since 26 beta 2 on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. I have noticed zero bugs, it’s been perfectly usable with only two design decisions that I dislike, but are minor.
On Mac, the corner handle grab change was a miss but doesn’t affect me much because I don’t do much window resizing.
On my iPad, the fly in and fly out animation for the App Library doesn’t necessarily follow your swipe direction.
I’ve never seen a lock screen wiggle, my guess that might be related to debris or finger moisture more than the OS
Nope, the wiggle problem requires turning the screen off and then back on. It's a software problem, not a user problem.
I'm happy it's working for you, but it's still an inconsistent and broken release.
> it's still an inconsistent and broken release
There are 10 iPhones in my immediate family orbit, all running 26 (Including an iPhone 12 Pro). Users ranging from their early teens to 90 and I am the one they call when there is any tech issues.
No one is complaining. Not too bad for an inconsistent and broken release.
That is nice for your family, but we have opposite experiences, my anecdata is just the opposite. Plenty of people are complaining. It's not always the most salient topic given current events (I'm in the United States) but it's just kind of like when Windows 11 or Windows 8 released.
> Just for one instance, bug I ran into a few hours ago (persisting in 26.3!) is that, sometimes, you can't even open the lock screen. It just wiggles.
Even if true, which I haven't experienced, that doesn't sound like a problem with glass.
> The performance continues to be very poor, rendering far below the 120fps target that iOS 18 hit consistently. This persists with 26.3.
Do you realize how tiny of a minority you are in to complain about this, much less even notice it?
It is true, and it's a problem that only started with iOS 26.
I'm not in a minority, this is something that's a new and common complaint among iPhone users. The performance of iOS 26 is very bad. Look at the huge recent spike in "iPhone battery problems" in Google Trends shortly after iOS 26 released, hitting its highest-ever in January 2026. The last peak was in 2011.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...
And look at how dramatic the graph for "iPhone slow" is. It's the highest it's ever been, by far, seven times higher than the previous highest peak:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...
Do you realize how tiny of a minority you are in not to complain about this, much less not to even notice it?
Sounds pretty usable to me.
> "100% usable" is an exaggeration that doesn't describe Apple's Liquid Glass
Only if you define “usable” as “bug free”
It's about 60% as usable. Weird and distracting jiggling makes it hard to target where the button will be.
Also the placement of buttons and functionality is completely scattered around the UIs, which severely reduces usability. What do all the mystery meat buttons do now? One has to relearn all the UX. There's a ton of improvement needed, it's about first-draft level quality.
Dark mode UI elements are almost invisible too, frequently.
It has a "my first redesign project" feel everywhere. On macOS I upgraded right away and it was a huge downgrade on performance. On iPhone I waited until 26.2, and merely had to suffer far lower usability.
What does % usable even mean?
That's a great question to a very vague subjective estimate! To me it means that about 60% of the interactions are as usable as the prior version. About 40% of actions I undertake on my phone cause a visceral "ugh this sucks now" reaction.
Try toggling “Reduce motion” and “Reduce transparency” on and see if your percentage improves.
Tell that to my keyboard that doesn't show up half the time and the other half covers random parts of the app
I find some parts of Liquid Glass to be an improvement over the previous flat style that lasted far too long. A lot of it seems really well thought out.
On mobile that is.
On larger screens with desktops and overlapping windows it looks kind of bad. Not unusable, just annoying. I am hoping this will change as more apps update their design.
Indeed, based on all the “look at that, you can’t even read xyz” screenshots around release time I thought it will be really bad. Upgraded and…it’s fine. After a week you don’t notice anything and the old OS will look dated. Just like every design change and any product that causes a lot of noise in the first week.
On the Mac it’s much rougher than on iOS.
Performance of iOS 26 on some iPhones isn't great. Sure, a lot of people complain because they don't like change, but we shouldn't ignore the performance issues and poor legibility on some elements. Those are valid complaints.
Agreed that there are more rough edges on Mac, but even then, I've been using Tahoe for months now and it's been fine. I hear podcasters saying that they're just skipping the entire Tahoe cycle and waiting until this fall's OS and I just don't get it.
It’s been perfectly fine for me too. I don’t understand the folks tossing it so much hate…I have to think for them it’s more about subjective style complaint than objective complaints. Operationally my Mac experience hasn’t changed.
Within an hour of using it, I honestly stopped noticing the differences.
I am a newer iPhone user (2 years now) and I am of the same opinion as you. I see so many people crying foul, that their phone is now unusable, but I’m just hear going “eh it’s uglier” and continuing. Curious what OP thinks is fundamentally broken.
Now I have heard about issues on MacOS and things but not really anything around the phone.
Something I've heard from someone that owns an iPhone 16 Pro is that animations are (were?) laggy sometimes. I was also looking at some pictures on an iPhone the other day (unsure about the model, maybe 14?) and it felt like it was dropping some frames while switching apps.
So while it may not be fundamentally broken, it's the type of stuff that would annoy me a lot if I used an iPhone. I never expect to go from a smooth experience to a low-end Android phone experience after a software update.
MacOS... I've avoided upgrading my M4 Max MBP so far after upgrading the M1 Air we have at home. It's just not as smooth as before, even with reduced transparency.
iPhone 16 Pro and Apple TV and Apple Watch have all become noticeably slower/laggier with choppy animation under 26. Totally unacceptable.
I have a 16 pro and haven’t seen any noticeable lagging in the animations.
My M4 Air has been fine after the 26 update. I haven’t noticed any difference in responsiveness.
I'm fine with the design, just want my phone to stop freezing up and glitching out.
It's usable. It is also noticeably slower on my iPhone 13, even after turning on "reduce transparency."
Reduce motion, that will help
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While I'm really glad they've fixed a bunch of important security vulnerabilities, I'm really hoping they fixed the screen flickering issue [1] they introduced in macos 26. It has been driving me insane and even impacts my Studio Display. My work computer is locked to 15.7.3 and has no such issues with either the internal or external display (The same display flickers in 26).
Really wish Apple would get their software quality up from the gutter.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/18/macos-tahoe-studio-disp...
A similar issue happens with Apple Silicon macs and external monitors since long time ago. A fix I found online [1] is to disable GPU dithering using the Better Display app.
The flickering was so bad in my case that the pixels got stuck for some minutes when it happened.
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I tried that and many other things like changing the default color profile and it and it didn't work. A reboot fixes it for a few days before returning, so it definitely seems like a bug rather than a hardware issue. Both my work MBP (No issues, macos 15) and personal Air (macos26) are apple silicon.
Dang, it worked for me, but my monitor is a 4K BenQ not a Studio Display, must be something else with those then.
I see flickering like crazy when I adjust the screen brightness on my M5 Macbook Pro on Tahoe.
But it's especially obvious when it dims itself based on ambient room brightness, I can actually see the vertical refresh happening as I move from a fully bright room to a dim one.
Is this related to the 'Screen Mirroring' problem?
When I connect my laptop to a projector, I can select an individual window, or at least I used to be able to select a window and just project that. However, now when I try to select the window, as soon as the mouse cursor gets near the selection button, the button disappears!!! It has been driving me absolutely insane.
Wow, I have an M4 MacMini with a Studio Display and haven't seen that. Hope I don't Jinx it when I get home to use it...
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iOS also flickers every time I exit an app back to the Home Screen.
Weird green tints for no reason.. bubbles that take so long to inflate, you think your tap was dropped. Round edges that no longer fit the text content. Stupid ellipses at the edges of wrapped text. And all the functions that now take two taps when one used to do it. Text rendered on top of text for crying out loud! Whole view panes clobberin* each other. WebKit is a mess of wasted black bars where menus were hidden. Multiple flashes of white and black between content changes. It hits Apple apps as well as trashing third party layout.
Too many defects to list.
Headline: Apple celebrates 50th anniversary by burning down 40 years of human interface knowledge.
Careful if you're still on MacOS Sequoia, Apple has hidden Tahoe as a default under updates. If you click updated now it automatically upgrade you to Tahoe.
If that's true, that would be new:
https://daringfireball.net/2025/11/software_update_tahoe_con...
I believe it is new. I’ve never seen them: - put a upgrade os version under “updates” - then select the upgrade os version instead the current version when there are multiple updates ( os patch, safari or xcode)
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Why couldn't Apple patch the zero-day using their new Background Security Improvements pipeline?
They've been delivering empty-noop test updates through that new pipeline in the past couple weeks to beta users, which suggests that they considered it.
Their previous security updates feature was mostly unused.
I suppose it’s not really working, or is the product of a team and no other internal team actually use it.
It's more the former. I'm assuming though that Background Security updates are basically the same thing as "Rapid Security Responses" was, which on the Mac I can recall being used once, 13.3.1(a) released the same day as 13.4 as an RSR.
Basically, the amount of stuff Apple can realistically change on the fly without restiching an entirely new system volume snapshot into place is quite small, so unless the stars align it can't be used.
dyld is not covered by them.
I imagine scheduling lined up for the 26.3 release and it wasn't considered dangerous enough. They did this with 26.2 as well including a fix for a zero day. I wonder if they are leveraging that to get people to update sooner. Imagine some people might be turned off of updating with the bugs and visual changes in 26. It's not like 26.2 or 26.3 have any major changes that are enticing.
26.4 is likely to have 9 new emoji, as usual for a late-cycle OS release. That may not particularly appeal to the "7bit ASCII for life" subset here, of course, but it's definitely a driver.
Have they fixed all the keyboard bugs introducted in iOS 26.0 yet? I’m not sure how much longer I can put up with issues like this - I might need to switch back to Android if they don't fix these soon.
Seriously, how hard is it to correctly measure the keyboard height and not render important UI elements, such as submit buttons, underneath it so you can’t click “Send”? It's getting close to unusable.
Update: No they haven't
So many bugs in this version of iOS, ive never seen anything like it. The UI for so many websites is mildly broken or misaligned now, keyboard randomly has a noticeable lag, audio does not return to normal volume if a background app makes a noise for a moment, and many more. Really awful, I’ve never wanted to downgrade iOS back to the old version until now.
Is there any word on whether these vulnerabilities were exploitable on devices with MIE[0]?
[0]: https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...
If Apple won't disclose, we'll need to wait for public PoCs for testing on MIE-enabled devices.
Relatedly, did Apple baseband have similar vulnerabilities as Broadcom WiFi/Bluetooth baseband?
Hang on, where are the equivalent 18.7.5 patches for my iPhone 13 Pro?
I feel I should be at least given the security patches if I don’t want to update to Apple’s widely derided iOS 26 UI awfulness.
Were Sequoia and iOS 18 affected?
Both show vulnerabilities on the Apple page: https://support.apple.com/en-us/100100
macOS was so buggy for me a few days ago that I updated my computer to the public beta. Boom, problem solved. So bizarre.
Do you feel an improvement in speed? My 32GB RAM M5 MBP is slow as molasses in Tahoe. My M1 MBA feels much faster (I haven't updated yet).
Do you use a lot of electron apps or a Chromium-based browser? Ever since Liquid Glass, I've had to run this script at each boot:
#!/bin/bash launchctl setenv CHROME_HEADLESS 1 defaults write -g NSAutoFillHeuristicControllerEnabled -bool false
It removes the drop-shadow from Chrome and removes an autofill context.
Now if they'd only fix—meaning remove—Liquid Glass and other nonsense that they've added, I could stop sticking to Sequoia..?
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Now if they'd only fix the CarPlay issues, I really miss working navigation in my car.
I have called and opened tickets, and I keep hearing it'll be fixed real soon now.
It broke my carplay too. Updating my infotainment system' fixed' it.
There are no known updates for my car unfortunately - annoyingly my wife's iPhone 16 works fine.. in both of our cars.
This one - I have seen some shit folks. This one is not good.
Do you care to add something of substance or did you just stop in to leave meaningless, vague comments?
Maybe they can fix Messages from bugging out all the time. Apple software has gone down the drain. I don’t want a million new features I just want the ones that make a phone a phone actually work 99.5% of the time
No problems with Messages here.
Messages has always randomly stopped syncing between my devices. No matter the iOS and Mac OS versions i run. Happy?
If you mean "Messages in iCloud":
I ended up having to "delete messages from icloud" on all devices, escalate to support after they weren't deleted 45 days later (the UI shows -15 days in that scenario), reenable sync and then see it still failing to complete a Sync Now, redisable sync and re-delete messages in cloud, wait another 45 days, and then ask them to escalate to the iCloud backend team to run a purge on their end of just my messages in icloud records. It worked, but I don't know if they've had enough time for whatever corruption they found to be patched into their automated ops-repair/cleanup processes (and they wouldn't tell me if I asked), it's only been a couple months.
At least I don't store anything in iCloud. Unless Apple stealth turns on something on updates.
Why would I be happy?
Your message implied a known issues with Messages affecting everyone. But that is not the case.
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code