Hello, new Phone app

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I’m running the iOS 26 beta, and I gotta say, I don’t much like the new “unified” Phone app. Remember that? The iPhone app used for making and receiving calls that no one uses these days?

Then again, I didn’t much like the old Phone app, either.

The new app dispenses with the three main tabs from the old design — Favorites, Recents and Voicemail — and unifies them into a new main tab called Calls.

For sure, this makes it easier to see all the calls you ignored or sent straight to voicemail. And it makes it dead easy to listen to voicemails and return calls, when before you had to dance around tabs to do this.

But I don’t like the look of the Favorites section up top. For me, it gets clipped because I have more than the standard eight favorites. It’s the first thing I see when I open the Phone app, and for irrational reasons, it really bugs me.

Love it or hate it, the new design is about to be foisted on all of us when Apple releases iOS 26 in the coming weeks.

Meantime, here’s how to live with the new design — and how to get rid of it if you don’t like it.

Also in today’s newsletter:

• I’m a robovacuum enthusiast. Our robovac is the only thing keeping the Kahney household from being buried in dust and dander, but it can’t climb stairs. Eufy just showed off a solution for that: The company’s new MarsWalker is a separate stair-climbing robot that transports your robot vacuum from one floor to another.

• The long-awaited folding iPad is starting to move from concept to actual production — but there’ll be another foldable first. Here are the details.

• Anker had a big hit with a beefy portable power bank that just got even beefier. This one will power a small city!

• This looks like a good deal: Get access to many of the latest cutting-edge AIs without subscribing to each one separately.

• Apple Arcade continues to expand with the addition of NFL Retro Bowl ‘26 and Jeopardy! Daily.

— Leander Kahney, EIC.

^{A message from the Cult of Mac Deals team}

^{A message from the Cult of Mac Deals team}

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Today’s poll

Results from yesterday’s poll: Instagram on iPad: Do you care anymore?

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