Maybe the iPhone 13 Mini really will stay choppy, but even my brand-new current gen iPad got super-choppy for the first couple of hours and I was freaked out. Turns out it was just that thing where iOS reindexes everything for Spotlight on a major version upgrade, or god only knows what it's doing in the background.
- Apps launch slower (time from app launch to interactivity)
- Apps hang more frequently (interface freezes after interaction)
- Apps drop frames (scrolling and animations stutter)
I imagine it’s some combination of the above. Apps and the operating systems that run them get bigger and slower over time.
There really isn’t a “slowness constant” to tweak short of animation speed, and I believe Apple made app launch noticeably faster, animation-wise in iOS 26. Just lots and lots of regressions to fix.
but I agree, the hangs in the latest operating systems are brutal. Feels a little half-baked. macOS Tahoe is much worse than Sequoia on this by far. I’m hoping that the later releases (26.1, etc) make the situation better.
Performance is generally good, but when there are a lot of effects in Safari’s search view it stutters.
Battery drain was higher for over a week, but now it’s mostly normal. My all day battery use is 60-75% daily (you can check this in the updated battery settings tab), low phone use days are 40-60%.
There are battery use landlines though — this morning playing around with depth effect on wallpapers used 50% of my (95% health) battery in 15 minutes. Camera is very heavy as well.
My phone always runs slowly immediately following an OS update. I assume it's doing a bunch of work in the background, deleting temporary files or whatever. Even downloading and installing app updates I'm now eligible for. Can always tell because the thing gets warm.
Within a few hours it's back to normal. I don't like the Liquid Glass update but it's not impacted performance.