Apple iOS 26.1 Beta Leak: What’s Changing in Your iPhone Next

Apple has made the iOS 26.1 developer beta available, only a week after the public launch of iOS 26. The update introduces wider language availability for Apple Intelligence and AirPods Live Translation, along with design adjustments across core applications.

The latest beta expands Apple Intelligence to eight additional languages: Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese (Portugal), Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Traditional Chinese. With this rollout, Apple’s AI platform now covers 24 languages in total — its largest expansion since the feature’s debut.

AirPods Live Translation also receives an upgrade, gaining Japanese, Korean, Italian, and both simplified and traditional Chinese Mandarin as new conversation modes. The feature enables users with AirPods and iPhone 15 Pro or later devices to access real-time translation in supported languages.

Visual updates appear in several built-in apps. The Phone app integrates Apple’s Liquid Glass design for keypad buttons, continuing the style changes first introduced with iOS 26. In Apple Music, users can now swipe on the mini player to move between tracks, removing the need for on-screen buttons. The Photos app replaces its full-width video scrubber with a smaller, pill-shaped control, while the Calendar list view now uses full-width colour highlights to separate events more clearly.

Safari adopts a wider tab bar with reduced padding. Security update terminology has also shifted, with “Rapid Security Updates” renamed to “Background Security Improvement.” Code within the beta further references Apple testing support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a communication standard developed by Anthropic for AI agents, though the functionality is not yet active.

At present, iOS 26.1 beta is restricted to developers. A public beta version is expected in the near term, but Apple has not confirmed when the final release will roll out to all users.