Apple makes iOS 26 seem faster by tweaking animations

Apple is currently testing iOS 26, which it’s expected to release next month along with the iPhone 17 family. The new OS version comes with tweaked animations, and this makes the entire experience feel much faster.

Interestingly, the actual change in animation timing is quite small – around 150 milliseconds quicker. But there is a much bigger difference in the pacing, and that affects how fast it feels. This, in turn, makes the entire OS feel faster despite the fact that nothing has changed performance-wise.

If you’re a die-hard Android fan you’ve probably scoffed a few times reading this – a lot of skins let you tweak the animations (which are generally faster than Apple’s to begin with), and you can go a step further through Developer Options if you’re careful not to touch anything else, making all animations shorter by default at the OS level.

This does in fact make everything feel faster, even though nothing changed aside from the animations, so Apple is clearly onto something here, it’s just funny how long it takes the Cupertino company sometimes to “discover” such “revolutionary” tweaks that have been available from its competitors for years.

Via