Apple Launches iOS 26.1 Beta 2 Update With Background Security Improvements, Custom Workouts in Fitness App

On October 6th, 2025, Apple released the iOS 26.1 Beta 2 update for iPhone to developers and beta testers. The new operating system (OS) firmware is available almost two weeks after the introduction of the first beta update of the iOS 26.1 series. The new update includes Background Security Improvements in Settings, an option to create custom workouts in the Fitness app, a slight change to the alignment of text and icons in Settings, and more.

iOS 26.1 Beta 2 Update: What’s New

Background Assets

Resolved Issues

• Fixed: AssetPackManager.url(for:) unexpectedly throws an error when looking up the URL for a locally available asset file. (157959878) (FB19512759)

Game Controller

Resolved Issues

• Fixed: The time returned by GCPressedStateInput.lastPressedStateTimestamp is not in the correct time domain. (159124910)

HealthKit

New Features

• HealthKit authorization UI now displays a single Blood Pressure switch to control changes to Systolic and Diastolic Blood Pressure type authorizations. The API is unchanged and apps should request for both types in code. (153579893)

Resolved Issues

• Fixed: HKCorrelation objects of type .bloodPressure fail to save with errorInvalidArgument HKError code if they don’t have exactly one systolic and one diastolic blood pressure quantity sample its set of objects. (151889745)

Keyboard

Known Issues

• You are unable to select diacritical marks and character variants with keyboard. The base character is inserted instead of the intended variant. (159398021)

NearbyInteraction

New Features

• NINearbyAccessoryConfiguration now supports additional UWB parameters such as hopping mode. (157879907)

Known Issues

• Running an NISession with an NIDLTDOAConfiguration results in an error. (151352056)

Siri

Known Issues

• Questions related to News in Portuguese might fall back to Web search or ChatGPT. (153935878)
• Siri Voice preview might default to legacy pt-BR voices, rather than new pt-PT options. (155929981)Workaround: Select Voice 2 as your new Siri voice. Ask Siri a question, and you will hear the new pt-PT offering.
• The initial pt-PT Siri Voices have pronunciation and word stress issues. Your feedback is appreciated. (160205691)

SwiftUI

New Features

• @Animatable macro is now available starting with iOS 13, macOS 10.15, tvOS 13, and watchOS 6. (158895616)

Resolved Issues

• Fixed: Buttons that do not specify an explicit label display text instead of a symbol in toolbars. (157671221)
• Fixed: The navigationLinkIndicatorVisibility modifier crashes when run on iOS 17, iOS 18 and aligned releases.You must recompile your app against the 26.1 SDK to receive this fix. (158236264) (FB19613386)

Known Issues

• On iOS and iPadOS, @FocusState doesn’t work in safeAreaBar. (158720838)

UIKit

Resolved Issues

• UIDocument was incorrectly annotated to be main actor only. This has been corrected. As a result you might see new warnings or errors show up in your Swift code using UIDocument. (149990945)