iOS 26 brought a significant new Liquid Glass design that, in some cases, has led users to report slower iPhone performance. However, John Gruber from Daring Fireball returned to iOS 18 after using iOS 26 for a long time and experienced quite a different experience.

John Gruber Used iOS 18 for Two Full Days, Found it Slower than iOS 26

Over the weekend, John Gruber published a short post simply titled 'iOS 26 feels faster than iOS 18.'

From Daring Fireball:

After using the iPhone 16 Pro with iOS 18.7.7 as my main phone for two days, here’s another follow-up point. Last summer, towards the end of the iOS 26 beta cycle, it became clear that Apple had sped up many system-level animations. Example: the animation of returning to the Home Screen by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. People noticed this. However, it didn’t get much attention.

But, if you want to notice, stay on iOS 18 for two days like I did. So many little things feel slower. I really don’t know if something is actually slower, but because the animations are slower, it looks slower and thus feels slower. If you’re just using an iPhone, you might not notice, but those considering switching from Android definitely do.

One of the biggest speed changes came last summer with iOS 26 beta 6; Apple significantly sped up the app launch animation. I remember being affected by the new speed at that time but quickly got used to it and forgot.

This change helped iOS 26 feel fast even on older iPhones. However, I have no doubt that some other aspects of iOS 26 lead to performance issues—especially in version 26.0.

Now that we are on iOS 26.4, it’s interesting to hear from someone like Gruber that iOS 18 actually feels slower than iOS 26.

It would be interesting if Apple allowed users to return to iOS 18 or easily switch between each OS version so that more users could experience the difference. Gruber was able to conduct this experiment simply because he had an old iPhone running the previous operating system.

How was your experience between iOS 26 and iOS 18? Share with us in the comments.

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