iOS 26.4: Top 10 New Features Coming to Your iPhone

iOS 26.4 isn’t the big update with the new Siri features we were hoping for, but there are some useful quality of life improvements, and a little fun with AI playlists and new emoji characters.

• A playground for playlists – Apple Music has a Playlist option that allows you to generate playlists with text-based descriptions. You can include emotions, feelings, activities, or do something completely silly and let the AI ​​figure out what you mean.
• Ambient music widget – Apple added a built-in Ambient Music feature widget to iOS, so it’s faster to play background sounds. You can choose from Apple-curated playlists for sleep, relaxation, productivity, and wellness.
• Emoji – There are eight new emoji characters including trombone, treasure chest, inverted face, furry creature, fighting cloud, orca, landslide, and ballet dancer.
• Reduce Bright Effects – If you don’t like Liquid Glass, there’s a Minimize Bright Effects setting that reduces the brightness when you tap buttons. Reduce motion and limit liquid glass animation more than it did before.
• Adjusting the Keyboard – iOS 26.4 fixes an iOS 26 keyboard bug that caused typos when typing quickly.
• Buy Shares – Adults in Family Sharing groups no longer have to use the same payment method, and Apple now allows everyone to add their own credit or debit card.
• CarPlay AI applications – CarPlay users can use third-party chatbots with CarPlay starting in iOS 26.4. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google will have to update their apps with CarPlay support, but the framework is in iOS 26.4.
• Video podcasts – The Podcasts app has native video episode support with HLS streaming, as well as options to switch between audio and video and download videos offline.
• Average sleep time – The Sleep feature in the Health app now records your average sleep for the past two weeks to give you a better idea of ​​how your sleep time affects sleep.
• Stolen Device Protection – Stolen Device Protection is now enabled by default. Prevents physical theft and access to your iPhone by requiring biometric authentication for things like viewing passwords and turning off Lost Mode on iPhone. Some features such as changing the Apple ID password have a one-hour security delay.

There are other new additions in iOS 26.4, such as offline song recognition in Control Center, near concert suggestions and full-page album artwork in Apple Music, easier access to customization options for subtitles in media apps, and support for Apple Creator Studio for Freeform, detailed in our full iOS 26.4 notes article.

Release date

The iOS 26.4 release candidate is available to developers and public beta testers, and it’s likely that the update will see an official launch on March 23 or March 24.