The design revamp brought about with iOS 26 brings all sorts of new animations along with the Liquid Glass visual treatments. With beta 6, Apple overhauled Springboard’s app launch animations for the first time in years.
Apps now launch to full-screen much faster than before, accompanied a minor warp effect that is reminiscent of how Mac windows minimise to the dock. The faster animation speed makes a big difference. It really feels like iOS 26 made your iPhone faster, even several-year old models …
Users love OS updates that optimize the system and improve performance. While the actual performance of your iPhone is unchanged on iOS 26, the perception is what matters. And the illusion brought about by the new animations is that your phone is a lot faster. This will undoubtedly have a big boost to customer satisfaction.
Immediately after updating this fall, users will tap on an app icon on their home screen and immediately feel like their phone is snappier and more responsive. iOS 26 with Liquid Glass is a major overhaul and the changes will be controversial in some areas, but negative user sentiment will be hard to muster if the belief is the update also made their phone feel like new.
What’s funny is the actual change in the overall animation timing is relatively small. It’s just about 150 milliseconds quicker overall. The bigger difference is the pacing, which dramatically affects how it feels.
On iOS 26, apps leap out of their icon much more quickly, so they expand to almost full size faster than iOS 18. iOS 18 is more spring-loaded, and ramps up more gradually. If you compare two iPhones side-by-side, the app on iOS 26 expands to 90% of the screen while the app on the iOS 18 phone is only about halfway done.
This change is very much welcomed, and looks especially great on modern iPhones with high refresh rate ProMotion displays.
It actually somewhat follows a trend set by Android. Most Android launchers use animation speeds that are significantly faster than what Apple shipped with iOS 18. iOS 26 closes the gap.
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