iOS 26 added four new features that I used almost every day

Major iPhone updates like iOS 26 usually come with hundreds of new features and changes, but a very small set become everyday necessities. Here are four new features of iOS 26 that I find myself using almost every day.

I love Apple Notes and use them in many different ways—as evidenced by my library of 2,600+ notes.

Among the new Notes features in iOS 26, my favorite is the Adaptive toolbar.

Notes has been slowly adding new features every year for a while now. But for many applications, constant addition can cause a problem with feature bloat, or not being able to access everything the application can do.

The Adaptive Toolbar does a great job of alleviating those problems.

When writing or editing text in a note, the toolbar just above the keyboard now automatically changes to show you the most relevant tools at any given time. For example:

• When editing normal text, you’ll see bold, italic, underline, and highlight tools
• If you have multiple lines of text selected, you’ll see options for list, indent, outdent, block quoting tools, and more.

You can still access the full tool list by swiping, but you don’t have to switch as often.

#2: Preview the app

Preview has been around for years on the Mac, but in my opinion it never seemed necessary on iOS. When I needed to access a PDF or image on my iPhone, using Quick Look within the Files app was perfectly fine.

But now that the iOS preview is here, I’m surprisingly happy to have it.

Most of the preview functionality is simply an export of the previous properties of the files. However, there are new additions, and I especially enjoyed being able to view a document in Preview while navigating my file system in a separate Files app. Especially if you combine several PDFs at the same time, Preview and Files make a good combination.

Have you ever viewed a long PDF and needed to cut something to a different document? On a Mac, that’s no problem as you can open different PDFs in separate windows, and have the Finder as a separate window as well. Now in iOS 26, using Preview and Files in tandem brings the iPhone experience closer to what you’d get on a Mac.

#3: Sleep Health Score

Sleep tracking isn’t a new feature in iOS 26, but the Health app’s Sleep Score is.

Sleep Score takes all your existing sleep data and turns it into something that is, in my opinion, at least, very useful.

I’ve never been a fan of the way sleep data is displayed in the Health app. But having a daily sleep score is a great way to, at a glance, understand how well I slept the night before.

The three metrics of Duration, Sleep Time, and Interruptions also make a lot of sense to me. And if my score is too low or too high on a particular day, it’s easy to see which factors contributed.

Similar to how the Apple Watch’s Activity rings made it easy to track key movement metrics, Sleep Score also encouraged me to keep an eye on my sleep data every day.

#4: Search for AI on maps

One of the most important features in Apple Maps is search. And in iOS 26, it got a big improvement.

Search is now powered by Apple Intelligence on AI-enabled iPhones. This means that the results are highly relevant, intelligent, and you can even use natural language.

AI has been improving search in various Apple apps, starting with Photos in iOS 18.1. And Maps has the potential to be one of the most influential.

I use Maps every day, often doing simple and complex searches. And in my experience, it’s greatly enhanced by Apple Intelligence.

Now it’s easier to find places that I already know exist, especially when there are more places available. But Maps search is also now better for discovery, with AI able to understand queries that include several parameters.

Search may not be the brightest AI feature, but it certainly helps.

What new iOS 26 features are you using the most? Let us know in the comments.

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