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iOS 26.3 and macOS 26.3 Fix Dozens of Vulnerabilities, Including Zero-Day

151 points| akyuu | 18 days ago |macrumors.com

113 comments

order

pikhq|18 days ago

I hope they release a version of these fixes on iOS 18 in a form installable on an iPhone 14; I've been trying to stay away from Liquid Glass until it's actually usable. I really don't want to be forced to upgrade, since Apple seems to have replaced UX testing with "just ship it," as has become standard in the industry.

BitwiseFool|18 days ago

Liquid Glass looks pretty from a distance, but my biggest gripe with the design language is just how difficult so many things become to read or interact with. Given that the whole raison d'être of liquid glass is transparent effects, the options to limit that or otherwise increase contrast simply do not go far enough. I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable.

My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.

layer8|18 days ago

They won't, it already didn't happen for 18.7.4 and 18.7.3 (only via beta channel for the latter), and the present fixes are being released as 18.7.5 for the iPhone XS/XR. Still I think that staying on iOS 18 is the lesser evil.

47282847|18 days ago

I immediately enabled “reduce transparency” and “strong contrast” in the accessibility settings and didn’t really notice much difference to 18 then. Not a big deal at all.

Cider9986|18 days ago

I recommend installing liquid glass on iOS. It actually has been looking good on there since 26.2. Macs have been godawful with liquid glass.

RASBR89|18 days ago

Updated my 13 mini. Performance is fine / maybe better.. but battery. Tanked. How true is the ‘it takes days for reindexing’ statement?

markoa|18 days ago

iOS Liquid Glass needs its own Snow Leopard.

aydyn|18 days ago

[deleted]

ProfessorLayton|18 days ago

While I'm really glad they've fixed a bunch of important security vulnerabilities, I'm really hoping they fixed the screen flickering issue [1] they introduced in macos 26. It has been driving me insane and even impacts my Studio Display. My work computer is locked to 15.7.3 and has no such issues with either the internal or external display (The same display flickers in 26).

Really wish Apple would get their software quality up from the gutter.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/18/macos-tahoe-studio-disp...

ErneX|18 days ago

A similar issue happens with Apple Silicon macs and external monitors since long time ago. A fix I found online [1] is to disable GPU dithering using the Better Display app.

The flickering was so bad in my case that the pixels got stuck for some minutes when it happened.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/s/TDOa9Lb5rP

Aloisius|18 days ago

I see flickering like crazy when I adjust the screen brightness on my M5 Macbook Pro on Tahoe.

But it's especially obvious when it dims itself based on ambient room brightness, I can actually see the vertical refresh happening as I move from a fully bright room to a dim one.

copperx|18 days ago

Is this related to the 'Screen Mirroring' problem?

When I connect my laptop to a projector, I can select an individual window, or at least I used to be able to select a window and just project that. However, now when I try to select the window, as soon as the mouse cursor gets near the selection button, the button disappears!!! It has been driving me absolutely insane.

vondur|18 days ago

Wow, I have an M4 MacMini with a Studio Display and haven't seen that. Hope I don't Jinx it when I get home to use it...

FarmerPotato|18 days ago

iOS also flickers every time I exit an app back to the Home Screen.

Weird green tints for no reason.. bubbles that take so long to inflate, you think your tap was dropped. Round edges that no longer fit the text content. Stupid ellipses at the edges of wrapped text. And all the functions that now take two taps when one used to do it. Text rendered on top of text for crying out loud! Whole view panes clobberin* each other. WebKit is a mess of wasted black bars where menus were hidden. Multiple flashes of white and black between content changes. It hits Apple apps as well as trashing third party layout.

Too many defects to list.

Headline: Apple celebrates 50th anniversary by burning down 40 years of human interface knowledge.

tailnode|18 days ago

Why couldn't Apple patch the zero-day using their new Background Security Improvements pipeline?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102657

altairprime|18 days ago

They've been delivering empty-noop test updates through that new pipeline in the past couple weeks to beta users, which suggests that they considered it.

jiehong|18 days ago

Their previous security updates feature was mostly unused.

I suppose it’s not really working, or is the product of a team and no other internal team actually use it.

jajuuka|18 days ago

I imagine scheduling lined up for the 26.3 release and it wasn't considered dangerous enough. They did this with 26.2 as well including a fix for a zero day. I wonder if they are leveraging that to get people to update sooner. Imagine some people might be turned off of updating with the bugs and visual changes in 26. It's not like 26.2 or 26.3 have any major changes that are enticing.

saagarjha|18 days ago

dyld is not covered by them.

Humphrey|18 days ago

Have they fixed all the keyboard bugs introducted in iOS 26.0 yet? I’m not sure how much longer I can put up with issues like this - I might need to switch back to Android if they don't fix these soon.

Seriously, how hard is it to correctly measure the keyboard height and not render important UI elements, such as submit buttons, underneath it so you can’t click “Send”? It's getting close to unusable.

Update: No they haven't

soared|18 days ago

So many bugs in this version of iOS, ive never seen anything like it. The UI for so many websites is mildly broken or misaligned now, keyboard randomly has a noticeable lag, audio does not return to normal volume if a background app makes a noise for a moment, and many more. Really awful, I’ve never wanted to downgrade iOS back to the old version until now.

NetOpWibby|18 days ago

macOS was so buggy for me a few days ago that I updated my computer to the public beta. Boom, problem solved. So bizarre.

copperx|18 days ago

Do you feel an improvement in speed? My 32GB RAM M5 MBP is slow as molasses in Tahoe. My M1 MBA feels much faster (I haven't updated yet).

urbandw311er|18 days ago

Hang on, where are the equivalent 18.7.5 patches for my iPhone 13 Pro?

I feel I should be at least given the security patches if I don’t want to update to Apple’s widely derided iOS 26 UI awfulness.

gadyq|16 days ago

It made my emails go to split screen which I hate and have tried everything and I can’t get rid of it hate it

kelm64|10 days ago

What a fucking shit storm you created Apple once again with shit software 26.3! iPhone 15+: Apps won’t open or can’t log into them or they just crash, screen glitches, saved passwords not working, every single time I have to reset it ( which is often do to your shit software) my sound disappears and I have to play with the silent button and sound buttons, etc. I can’t even get into the Apple community I’m sure it’s cause there’s SOOOOOOOOOO many other people complaining!!!!! ANDROID HERE I COME!!!!!FUCK YOU APPLE NO MORE MONEY FOR YOU BITCHES!!!!!!

altern8|18 days ago

Now if they'd only fix—meaning remove—Liquid Glass and other nonsense that they've added, I could stop sticking to Sequoia..?

Aloha|18 days ago

Now if they'd only fix the CarPlay issues, I really miss working navigation in my car.

I have called and opened tickets, and I keep hearing it'll be fixed real soon now.

niij|18 days ago

It broke my carplay too. Updating my infotainment system' fixed' it.

an-allen|18 days ago

[deleted]

IAmGraydon|18 days ago

Do you care to add something of substance or did you just stop in to leave meaningless, vague comments?

ost-ing|18 days ago

Maybe they can fix Messages from bugging out all the time. Apple software has gone down the drain. I don’t want a million new features I just want the ones that make a phone a phone actually work 99.5% of the time

LeoPanthera|18 days ago

No problems with Messages here.