Apple Shakes Hands with Fourth Developer Beta for All Major Operating Systems
Apple has made available its fourth developer beta builds for the upcoming software updates themselves-iOS 26.1, iPadOS 26.1, watchOS 26.1, macOS Tahoe 26.1, visionOS 26.1, and tvOS 26.1. This release comes a little later than what is usually expected, which could be due to the recent disruption of AWS services.
What's New in Beta 4
Once beta releases tend to focus on little things, the fourth build introduces a handful of visible changes mostly dealing with iOS 26.1:
- Liquid Glass Customization: Choose a more opaque Liquid Glass effect.
- Camera Gesture Control: A new switch to disable the swipe gesture for opening the camera on the lock screen prevents unintended action.
- Apple TV Rebranding: The new title of Apple TV+ is merely Apple TV.
- Extended Language Support: Apple Intelligence now supports Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese (Portugal), Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.
- Live Translation on AirPods add support for Chinese (Mandarin simplified and traditional), Italian, Japanese, and Korean.
The Route to 26.1 Previous Recaps of Betas
This builds upon what prior beta versions have already introduced. Take a moment to reminisce about what came before:
Key features from Beta 3
- Brand new icon for Apple TV app.
- Enable notification forwarding settings.
- To capture sound during communication, Local Capture has also been extended to iOS.
- References to unreleased wallpapers and integration of future third-party AI.
Key features from Beta 1
- Update to Apple Intelligence with Live Translation for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
- First aspects of a Model Context Protocol (MCP) for interoperation with third-party AI agents.
- Enhancements to the Liquid Glass effect of the dialer keypad and new dedicated scrubbing for photo/video content.
- If you swipe, you can change tracks within the Apple Music app.
Availability
Those fourth beta builds are now made available upon all registered developers to download onto their devices and test.
