The first public beta for iOS 26.3 is now accessible less than a week after the release of iOS 26.2. Although it lacks some of the features of the previous update, there are still a number of potentially important changes.
According to MacRumors and others, the most significant of these is a tool that facilitates the conversion from iOS to Android.
By just placing your iPhone next to an Android device, you will be able to transfer content including notes, photographs, messages, apps, passwords, and your phone number. Health information and secure objects, like locked notes, won’t be sent, but this is done wirelessly without the need for additional apps.
This should benefit everyone, though, as Google is putting in place a similar mechanism that makes switching from Android to an iPhone simple.
New features spotlight in iOS 26.3: weather wallpapers and notification forwarding
As well as that, this iOS 26.3 beta also includes changes to the wallpaper gallery.
Now, the ‘Weather & Astronomy’ section has been split into two sections, one for ‘Weather’ and the other for ‘Astronomy’. That weather section has also gained some new wallpapers.
Finally, as spotted by 9to5Mac, this beta also includes an interface for notification forwarding, so that third-party devices can access your notifications.
In order to improve compatibility between non-Apple smartwatches and iPhones, a new regulation in the EU mandates that this feature be available.
Although the functionality isn’t completely operational yet, we can tell from the UI of this beta that you can only pass alerts to one associated item at a time and that notifications won’t show up on a paired Apple Watch when notification forwarding is enabled.
That’s all that has been discovered thus far in this beta, while it’s possible that there are further things to be discovered. However, because it’s almost time for the holidays and they don’t want to deal with too many bugs, Apple typically publishes rather feature-light betas at this time of year.
The next iOS 26.3 beta and the release of the final version are likely to be delayed until early next year due to this timeframe.
