iOS 26 brought a major new Liquid Glass design that, in some cases, led to user reports of slower iPhone performance. But Daring Fireball’s John Gruber recently went back to iOS 18 after a long time on iOS 26, and had a surprisingly different experience.
John Gruber used iOS 18 again for two full days, found it slower than iOS 26
Over the weekend, John Gruber published a brief post titled simply, ‘iOS 26 feels faster than iOS 18.’
From Daring Fireball:
One more follow-up point after I spent two days using an iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.7.7 as my main phone. At some point late in the iOS 26 beta cycle last summer, it became obvious that Apple had sped up a bunch of system-level animations. Prime example: the animation when you swipe up from the bottom of the screen to go back to the Home Screen. People noticed. But it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention since.
But man, if you want to notice, do what I did and spend two days back on iOS 18. So many little things feel slower. I don’t know if anything actually is slower, but because the animations are slower, it looks slower, and that means it feels slower. You may not notice if you only use iPhones, but people contemplating a switch from Android definitely notice.
One of the biggest speed changes arrived with iOS 26 beta 6 last summer, when Apple made the app launching animation significantly faster than it had been. I remember being impressed by the new speed at the time, but quickly got used to it and forgot about it.
This change made a difference in helping iOS 26 feel fast even on older iPhones. Though I have no doubt some other aspects of iOS 26 resulted in performance issues—especially in 26.0.
Now that we’re on iOS 26.4 though, it’s fascinating to hear firsthand from someone like Gruber that iOS 18 actually feels slower, not faster than iOS 26.
It would be interesting if Apple let users downgrade to iOS 18, or even switch easily between each OS version so more users can experience the difference. Gruber was only able to run this experiment because he had an older iPhone still running the previous OS.
What’s your experience with iOS 26 been like vs iOS 18? Let us know in the comments.
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