Nutrient iOS SDK 26 release notes

10 September 2025

Nutrient iOS SDK 26 is a compatibility release ready for iOS 26, macOS 26, visionOS 26, and Xcode 26. Both the old and new designs are supported, and this release works back to iOS 16, macOS 13, and visionOS 1.

Following our version numbering system, this annual release is an easy upgrade. Two more advanced toolbar appearance APIs no longer have an effect when using the new design, but otherwise, there are no breaking changes.

To simplify knowing which version of Nutrient should be used with which version of Xcode and iOS, we’ve matched Apple’s numbering jump by going from Nutrient iOS SDK 14.x to 26.x. That said, our 26.1 release won’t be synced with iOS 26.1 or Xcode 26.1 because our four-week release cadence may not match Apple’s.

New design with Liquid Glass

Updating to Nutrient iOS SDK 26 is a requirement if you’re using the new design with Liquid Glass.

We made numerous adjustments to our UI to fit in with the new design, including:

  • Using scroll view edge effects instead of navigation bar backgrounds
  • Adding glass effects in various toolbars and accessory views
  • Ensuring bar buttons morph into modal views
  • Ensuring edit menus work correctly when expending from a horizontal bar to full menus
  • Updating our form and free text annotation input accessory views above the keyboard

API changes

When you’re using the new design, Apple notes that(opens in a new tab) UIBarAppearance interferes with the glass appearance and isn’t recommended. As such, the standardAppearance and compactAppearance properties of Toolbar (the ancestor class of AnnotationToolbar and PDFDocumentEditorToolbar) no longer have any effect. If you still wish to alter the appearance, use other customization APIs, like backgroundView or barTintColor.

Apple’s recommendation is generally to avoid a custom UI and to use the standard system look instead. To fit into the widest range of apps, we align Nutrient iOS SDK with this recommendation. We believe that using a standard UI leads to higher quality software, as more development time can be spent on functionality.

Message APIs

While fitting in with the new design was our focus, we also added NotificationCenter message APIs corresponding to most of our existing notifications, which offer better type safety and concurrency safety for modern Swift code.

For the full list of changes, see the changelog.

Compatibility guidelines

If you want to continue using Xcode 16:

  • Don’t update to Nutrient iOS SDK 26. Use Nutrient iOS SDK 14.12. The old design will be used on iOS 26 in this case, and we haven’t observed compatibility issues with this setup. However, we won’t release any more fixes for this version.
  • If you’re using Xcode 16 just to use the old design, we recommend updating to Xcode 26 and setting UIDesignRequiresCompatibility. See below.

If you want to use Xcode 26, but with the old design on iOS 26:

If you want to use Xcode 26 with the new design on iOS 26:

  • Use Nutrient iOS SDK 26 or later. This is a hard requirement, because older versions of Nutrient can’t use the newer APIs that are necessary to fit in with the new design.

For more details, see our system compatibility guide.

Removing support for older iOS versions

We’re planning to remove support for iOS 16 in the near future to streamline our development and testing. This will happen at the latest before June 2026, but it may be sooner. We’d welcome any feedback on your plans for iOS 16 — whether you’ve already dropped support or intend to in the future, your input helps us improve Nutrient for you.