As an iOS developer you know the drill. Every June at WWDC Apple announces a bunch of new features and APIs, and you drop everything to spend the summer getting your apps ready for the fall. That’s normal – but what’s different in redesign years is that the changes aren’t merely nice to haves, they feel far more essential.
Normally failing to adopt a new feature might make you feel bad as a developer, but most of your customers don’t know or care about the specific APIs you have or haven’t adopted. When the fundamental look and feel of the OS changes though, everyone notices. So if you care about your craft and want to be a good platform citizen, you have work to do.
At the same time, summer is a busy season when you’re the developer of a UV Index app. Business tends to peak from spring through late summer, so that’s the time to focus on marketing and shipping app features that you expect to make an immediate difference to your users. Getting ready for an OS update that isn’t going to ship until the fall can be hard to fit between other competing priorities. That meant I started a little late on preparing Sunbeam for iOS 26 — but once I did, things moved quickly, and I’m really happy with where the app has landed.
Embracing system styles
The first step was to strip away much of the custom code I’d written to style buttons and other basic system components. Luckily most of this back-ported smoothly to iOS 18 without the need for lots of availability checks, while still allowing those elements to slot right into the new design.
Because Sunbeam already leaned heavily on system components, this transition was easier for me than it might be for others. But the experience served as a good reminder that your life will be easier if you take advantage of what Apple provides rather than trying to build everything yourself from scratch. Custom UI should be the exception, not the rule, and it should be reserved for the core features that define your app.
The redesign also unlocked a feature I’d long wanted to add; environment selection for more accurate sunburn and vitamin D estimates. UV exposure can vary dramatically based on your immediate surroundings — at the beach, for instance, sand reflects UV rays to make you burn much faster than if you were sitting out on your front lawn.
The challenge was always UI. I wanted to surface this option without creating lots of visual clutter or confusing users. As I was adding support for the transparent top toolbar on iOS 26 though, I quickly realized this was the perfect opportunity to support this feature in a way that fits perfectly with both the app and the wider iOS design language.
Rethinking navigation and search
Some of the most noticeable changes in iOS 26 relate to navigation, especially the Tab Bar and the way search is now integrated as its own distinct tab through a lot of Apple’s system apps. This is more than just a cosmetic change — it changes how users move through your app.
In earlier versions of Sunbeam, search was implemented largely as an afterthought. It existed mainly to help you add new places to your favorites list. With iOS 26 though, I’ve elevated search to a center stage role. It’s now always available in the tab bar and lets you quickly find forecasts for both new locations and your saved favorites.
That shift also led me to rethink how favoriting works. Before, every new location you searched for was automatically added to your favorites. That apporach no longer made sense to me given the new UI. Now, selecting a search result will simply allow you to view the forecast for that location — if you decide to save a place, you just tap a dedicated toolbar button on the forecast screen. This makes it easy to check a one-off forecast without cluttering up your favorites.
What’s next
After spending the summer with Liquid Glass I’m happy with the progress I’ve made, but still have some changes I’m excited to work on over the coming months.
The most obvious next step is the app icon. I still love it, but on a Home Screen dominated by Liquid Glass it risks feeling out of place. I don’t quite have the design chops to take care of this myself, so this is something I’m hoping to work with the original designer on.
I’m also exploring using a new Liquid Glass element to show the progress of active exposure tracking sessions throughout the app. I experimented with using the new tabViewBottomAccessory() for this over the summer but didn’t find it flexible enough for my needs, so I‘m planning to work on something custom instead.
With summer winding down I’m looking forward to using the quieter months to experiment, refine, and get Sunbeam into great shape for spring 2026.