I will say, wait at least a day before coming to this conclusion.
Maybe the iPhone 13 Mini really will stay choppy, but even my brand-new current gen iPad got super-choppy for the first couple of hours and I was freaked out. Turns out it was just that thing where iOS reindexes everything for Spotlight on a major version upgrade, or god only knows what it's doing in the background.
My 13 mini still runs super slowly 4 days after updating. I’m just hoping for a quick patch update from Apple at this point, because 26 is a serious downgrade from 18 at this point.
- Apps launch slower (time from app launch to interactivity)
- Apps hang more frequently (interface freezes after interaction)
- Apps drop frames (scrolling and animations stutter)
I imagine it’s some combination of the above. Apps and the operating systems that run them get bigger and slower over time.
There really isn’t a “slowness constant” to tweak short of animation speed, and I believe Apple made app launch noticeably faster, animation-wise in iOS 26. Just lots and lots of regressions to fix.
The third: there’s stutter all over the place, jank in pretty much every animation. E.g. before leaving this comment I just swiped between two app screens and got a ~10 frame hiccough in the middle of the animation. The jank is pervasive.
A 10-frame hiccup is actually more of a hang (a single >50ms freeze) than consistent frame dropping (i.e. scrolling at 30fps)
but I agree, the hangs in the latest operating systems are brutal. Feels a little half-baked. macOS Tahoe is much worse than Sequoia on this by far. I’m hoping that the later releases (26.1, etc) make the situation better.
I’ve been on the beta for a few weeks, now on full iOS26 on iPhone mini 12.
Performance is generally good, but when there are a lot of effects in Safari’s search view it stutters.
Battery drain was higher for over a week, but now it’s mostly normal. My all day battery use is 60-75% daily (you can check this in the updated battery settings tab), low phone use days are 40-60%.
There are battery use landlines though — this morning playing around with depth effect on wallpapers used 50% of my (95% health) battery in 15 minutes. Camera is very heavy as well.
My phone always runs slowly immediately following an OS update. I assume it's doing a bunch of work in the background, deleting temporary files or whatever. Even downloading and installing app updates I'm now eligible for. Can always tell because the thing gets warm.
Within a few hours it's back to normal. I don't like the Liquid Glass update but it's not impacted performance.
I installed iOS 26 on my iPhone 13 Pro three days ago. It’s still choppy, especially noticeable when looking at the new search window, which has laggy animations. Besides that, the most noticeable issue is just scrolling through pages of apps. On iOS 18 everything was smooth, but here I can see choppiness and lag. And no, my batter is not below 80%.
Maybe the iPhone 13 Mini really will stay choppy, but even my brand-new current gen iPad got super-choppy for the first couple of hours and I was freaked out. Turns out it was just that thing where iOS reindexes everything for Spotlight on a major version upgrade, or god only knows what it's doing in the background.