iOS 26 gives the FaceTime app a whole new design and layout, plus new tools for filtering calls, the powerful Live Translation feature, and more. Here’s everything new.
New home screen
When you first open FaceTime, you’ll be met by an entirely redesigned home screen.
The previous list of recent calls and contacts has been replaced by a new, card-like interface.
Cards prominently display contact photos for the people you’ve recently FaceTimed, or suggestions of people you might want to call.
Each card includes the contact photo, date of the last call, whether it was video or audio, and a button to start a new call with them.
These cards look especially nice for contacts where you have a full poster card set. For those without the full art, you’ll see their contact photo as a circle in the center. If you’ve received a video message from someone, it will auto-play as you scroll.
Otherwise, on the home view you’ll find a green ‘New Call’ button at the bottom of the screen, and filtering tools in the top-right.
Liquid Glass design
iOS 26’s Liquid Glass design comes to FaceTime too.
You’ll see menus and button in the Liquid Glass style all throughout the interface.
Liquid Glass buttons during calls include the three-dot menu that offers features like screen sharing, SharePlay, and Live Translation.
Speaking of call buttons, they now automatically recede during calls so as not to block your view of the video feed.
Live Translation
Apple Intelligence brings Live Translation to several apps in iOS 26: Messages, Phone, and also FaceTime.
If you have an AI-supported iPhone, you’ll be able to get automatically translated captions for what you’re hearing.
So you’ll still hear the speaker’s voice, but with the visual aid of having their every word translated on-screen into your preferred language.
Support in iOS 26 will initially be limited to one-on-one calls in English (U.S., UK), French (France), German, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish (Spain).
Silence unknown callers
Similar to features coming to Messages and Phone, you can now choose to silence FaceTime calls from unknown callers.
This is entirely optional, but if spam FaceTime calls are an issue for you, iOS 26 lets you turn on call filtering.
With filtering enabled, all incoming calls from unknown callers will stay silent and get added to a separate list inside the filters menu.
Nudity detection warning
Apple is launching several expansions of its Communication Safety tools in iOS 26.
These features are generally intended for users with child accounts, not necessarily adults.
However, new support for nudity detection is available for adult accounts too—but as an optional setting.
If you enable ‘Sensitive Content Warning,’ then when nudity is detected, FaceTime will freeze the call and put a warning up on screen. It provides you the option to resume audio and video, or end the call.
From a privacy standpoint, here’s how Apple’s existing Communication Safety features work:
Communication Safety uses on-device machine learning to analyze photo and video attachments and determine if a photo or video appears to contain nudity. Because the photos and videos are analyzed on your child’s device, Apple doesn’t receive an indication that nudity was detected and doesn’t get access to the photos or videos as a result.
What new features do you want to see FaceTime get in iOS 26 and beyond? Let us know in the comments.
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