All the Biggest New Features and Changes in iOS 26 Beta 5

This week, Apple dropped the fifth developer beta for iOS 26. It arrived a little less than two weeks after the company released the first public beta for the update, so public testers can expect to see public beta 2 sometime soon. As with all iOS beta cycles, developers get the beta first, followed closely by a public beta release.

Developer beta 5 (which will be the same as public beta 2) is largely an aesthetic update: Many of the changes have to do with how iOS looks and feels, rather than features that add new functions to your iPhone. Still, it's an interesting glimpse of what Apple's software team is thinking as they continue to test and perfect the next big iOS update before its official launch this fall.

Here's what's new:

'Classic Mode' for Camera

In the Camera app's Settings page, you can now find a new "Classic Mode Switching" toggle. This doesn't bring back the Camera app from iOS 18, however. Instead, when enabled, the scroll direction when switching camera modes reverses. Apple has long given you the option to switch scroll directions for your Mac's mouse or trackpad, but if I'm not mistaken, this is the first time you have been able to choose the scroll direction of an element within a particular iOS app.

I'm not beta testing iOS 26, and I wouldn't have thought this was such a big deal. But this post on X discussing the change has over 1,500 likes, so I imagine there are a bunch of testers about it.

The Select button returns in Mail

The Mail app's "Select" button lets you quickly enter select mode, so you can start rounding up different emails in your inbox. Apple's engineers might have thought this button was a bit redundant, since you can select messages even faster by just swiping with two fingers, as iOS 26's Mail app hides the Select button away in the ••• menu.

That changes with beta 5: Select has returned, and is exactly where you'd expect to find it coming from iOS 18.6. It's possible Apple will reverse course in a future beta, but it's here for now.

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New animations

After updating your iPhone to the latest beta, you'll find a new UI change right away: You can now swipe up the Lock Screen to reveal the passcode screen, which has a new, jiggly animation:

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Control Center has a similar animation to it when thumbing through the pages as well:

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An updated Low Battery alert for the Dynamic Island

If you have an iPhone with a Dynamic Island, you'll see a subtle Low Battery pop-up appear when your battery hits 20%. You can long-press this alert to get a shortcut to turn on Low Power Mode, but you wouldn't know that just by looking at the original alert.

In beta 5, Apple updated this alert to make it larger. With that, the company included instructions to tap the alert to turn on Low Power Mode, and also updated the low battery icon.

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New AirDrop icon

The fifth iOS 26 beta updates the AirPlay icon, to better reflect Apple's new design language:

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New Macintosh HD icon

This isn't technically an iOS 26 thing, but I have to mention it: Apple's fifth macOS 26 beta replaces the classic Macintosh HD icon. The new icon resembles an SSD, the type of storage drive that has been featured in most Macs for well over decade now. The old icon, which resembled a drive with a spinning hard disk, is iconic, but not necessarily accurate, as Apple hasn't sold Macs with this type of drive for ages.

Still, the old icon is classic macOS, and the new one is, well, not so classic. Maybe it'll grow on me, but I wouldn't mind it if Apple workshopped this one a bit more, like it did the Finder icon.

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If you're not yet running the iOS 26 developer beta

You can test out these changes, and all of iOS 26's new features, by installing the iOS 26 beta 5 on your iPhone right now. I don't recommend it, however. This is still the developer beta, which is meant for software developers. Anyone can register their Apple Account as a developer to test it out for free, but you run the risk of taking on bugs and other glitches Apple hasn't caught yet.

The public beta, on the other hand, only comes out after Apple confirms the developer beta doesn't have any devastating issues that would affect a larger pool of users. You still run the risk of instability, which is why I don't run betas on my personal devices, but it's less risk, so if you're going try a beta, I'd recommend it over the developer beta.