Updating to iOS 26.2

This morning I pulled my iPhone off the charger and saw that it wanted to update to the latest version of iOS. It is always important to keep your smartphone updated to the latest version of the operating system. This ensures you have up-to-date security fixes and helps prevent hackers from taking over your phone. Unfortunately I have been reluctant to upgrade to iOS 26 but it looks like a necessary evil if I want to keep my phone safe and so I spent part of the day doing the update.

The first problem I have is that my phone only has 64GB of storage. I've managed to fill most of it with photos and videos. I went through the photo/video library and moved a lot onto my desktop Mac where I have significantly more space. Then I had to go into my recently-deleted folder and remove everything in it to free up space on the phone. I went to install the update and removed enough so that the update process could temporarily remove a couple of apps and reinstall them at the end of the update process. That concerned me a bit but I let the update move forward.

The process of going through hundreds of photos and videos took a toll on my battery so I made sure to plug the phone in to keep the battery from getting too low. Then I just waited for the update to complete and focused on work tasks. I got back to the phone and noticed it back in working order but I'm not a fan of the new user interface (UI).

For some reason, the engineers at Apple love the new "glass" look where you can see through elements on your screen. That makes it so the time on my lock screen blended in with the background image so well, telling time is difficult. I immediately needed to fix that. While I always wear a watch, sometimes it is hidden under multiple layers of clothing while I ski. For that case, I just pull my phone out to see the time. Fixing the clock involved long pressing on the lock screen and selecting the "Customize" button on the bottom. Then I selected the time widget (that is the technical term for the part of the screen that shows the current time) where I had the option of changing the color. I tried white but it blended in too much with the screen. After playing with different colors for a bit, I noticed 2 small buttons under the colors. One said "Glass" and the other "Solid."  I switched from glass to solid and that made the time so much easier to read regardless of what color I chose.

There are a few other UI changes I will need to make. While Apple thinks they know what I will like, they are wrong and like to screw things up. Like many of the software developers I have worked with over my career, the ones at Apple suffer from hubris and think they know more than they actually do. Most the time, they leave a way for me set things the way I like. On occasion though they really screw things up which leaves me questioning my loyalty to Apple.