Apple has made it easier than ever to make your devices feel like you, but also easier than ever to make them illegible — to yourself and everyone else.
Last week, I made a post on Threads voicing my own disapproval of iOS26’s readability issues, after trying the developer beta myself. I thought it would be just a private rant, but my post ignited a firestorm.
“Just change the color” has been the main response. “If you struggle reading, just go into accessibility settings”. While accessibility options are great to have, this misses the point entirely, and underlines a slow but steady shift in the philosophy of Apple’s design principles. It triggered my product designer brain, and I felt like an argument was due.
I’m not going to comment on the aesthetics of iOS26 and I’m just going to focus on what seems to be intended for the final release, not bugs of the developer beta.
Good defaults > Settings-diving
In my work as product designer at Appspace, we’ve wrestled with this countless times. Should we really give that feature to users, or are they going to abuse it? For example, in our editor for internal communications…