It’s been four weeks since Apple introduced the highly anticipated iOS 26 for iPhone, its major software redesign. Now, it’s time to test the third developer beta. This version brings performance and polish improvements, as well as a host of new features and functionality, along with iOS 26’s new Liquid Glass-inspired look. Apple, which continues its beta testing, has made another move today. The iOS 26 Beta 3 update for Apple developers has been officially released.

iOS 26 Beta 3 Released

The second beta saw design tweaks like readability improvements in Control Center, better menu layout in Safari, and enhanced accessibility options with added borders to High Contrast Mode. However, beta testers are still concerned about the full transparency of Notification Center. Also, the second beta revealed an odd issue where icons would become left-aligned when fewer than four apps were in the dock. These issues are being fixed with Beta 3.

Most importantly, we will be able to evaluate performance with beta 3. Because the target release date of the update is only two months away. With about a third of the beta process behind us, there is plenty of time to optimize performance, especially on older iPhone models.

Apple plans to release the first public beta of iOS 26 this month for enthusiastic users who want to test it with less risk than the developer beta. Today’s iOS 26 developer beta 3 release could form the basis of iOS 26 public beta 1, unless there are serious bugs.

The next major software update will work on iPhone SE (2nd generation), iPhone 11 and later models. iOS 18 will be the last version to work on iPhone XR, iPhone XS, and iPhone XS Max.

You may need to upgrade your iPhone to experience the latest features and design, but older iPhone models will continue to receive security updates for a while. Apple Intelligence features require an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, or a model from the iPhone 16 family.