From MacStories’ John Voorhees:

Today, Apple released version 26.1 of its full family of OSes. Every platform received attention, including the proverbial “bug fixes and feature enhancements,” but it was iOS 26.1 and iPadOS 26.1 that received the most changes that are likely to be noticed by users.

I really like the new alarm stop button that needs to be slid off to turn it off while the snooze button remains the same as before, a normal button. I think this makes a lot of sense since it’s really important that you don’t accidentally stop an alarm.

I have two issues with this. First, the slide button design is only available on the iPhone and presumably on the iPadOS 26.1 as well. However, I use an alarm with my Apple Watch every single morning, and I would appreciate a similar design pattern there as well. It happened to me more than once that I “missed” an alarm because of accidental presses. I have to say that otherwise, the Apple Watch alarm system has been 99% reliable for the past couple of years. However when I have an early flight, I usually set my alarm on both the watch and the phone, just to be 100% sure.

The second thing that is just a bit strange, is the option to disable this feature, so the alarm stop button works as before. As written by John Gruber on Daring Fireball:

If, for whatever reason, you don’t like this slide-to-stop feature, you can turn it off by toggling this option in Settings: Accessibility → Touch → Prefer Single-Touch Actions.

They just don’t want to piss people off, so they keep this option for a few more versions until they remove it completely down the line.

My issue with this is that when making a design decision, make a good one and stick to it. I understand that iOS is one of the most popular OS’ on the planet, so making any changes will always cause issues, but still. I think they could easily have made the decision to go with this new design, without supporting the older way of doing things.