The iPhone home screen gets a brand new look with iOS 26, thanks to a visual overhaul featuring a brand new set of icons for all of Apple’s apps, as well as glass and reflection effects throughout.
There are also more ways than ever for you to customize your icons, with new tinting options and styles. Here’s everything new.
On earlier versions of iOS, you could choose from Default, Dark, Automatic or Tinted icon customization styles. Tinted mode would render your icon with a highlight gradient color on a dark, near black backdrop. With iOS 26, there’s a whole new mode and additional controls to customize the other icon treatments.
New Tinted light mode option
The big limitation of the Tinted style has been lifted. With iOS 26, you can choose between Dark and Light treatments. The new Light Tinted style is bright and airy, with a degree of transparency to see elements of your wallpaper through the icons.
To choose the new light Tinted mode, long-press on your Home Screen. Tap Edit. Tap Customize. Tap Tinted and pick Light in the selector at the bottom of the screen.
You can also choose Dark or Auto in this menu. Auto means the Tinted mode switches between light and dark based on the phone’s system appearance, so you can make your app theme and icon theme always in sync.
Clear mode
The big change this year is a whole new icon mode, called Clear. This takes advantage of Apple’s new Liquid Glass UI theme to create icons that are highly translucent, prioritizing showing your background wallpaper image.
Clear icons are essentially monochrome, with the color from the background shining through. But you can further choose between Clear Light and Clear Dark, to suit your preference. As you might expect, Clear Light opts for brighter look whereas Clear Dark puts a near-black layer between the icon and the wallpaper. You can pick “Auto” to switch between Light and Dark based on the current system Appearance setting.
Automatic Dark mode
For the standard Dark mode icon set, you can now choose between “Always” or “Auto”. This means your home screen icons will either always be rendered in the dark style, or only when the device system appearance is also set to Dark Mode. The new “Auto” toggle replaces the old Automatic mode, and allows you to have light mode icons when your device is in Light mode, and dark mode icons when your device is in Dark mode.
And on the Mac too
Finally, all the new icon tinting options are also available on the Mac for the first time. This means you can easily customize all the app icons in your Mac dock. This also means you can finally make all your icons match, across iPhone, iPad and Mac.
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