to come into existence

Following the ongoing "hi, we're the Overwatch team, and we decided to simply Delete our old aim settings and give no ETA to when we are going to fix the botched camera for console" fiasco, on Friday (maybe Saturday?) my iphone popped up like hey I want to upgrade you to ios26 from 18. Me, a fool, sure, do that after I fall asleep.

I have regretted this decision ever since. I really need them to be more clear if they're upgrading the version to something brand new on the prompt, especially if there are UI changes, because I simply would not have done it. Ever since it upgraded to ios26, I have barely been able to use my phone. Two of four days I have had a migraine all day from having used it in the morning after waking up whilst my brain and eyes are still adjusting to being conscious - this is prime brain empty time, there is not much I can do in this state other than wait and I just aimlessly look at apps until I'm able to form thoughts. I have never had migraines or issues from screen usage until ios26 popped up. I don't know what it is, exactly, but I swear the colours on my phone are different now, it's like it's a new screen... and it probably is partly caused by liquid glass, which I can't turn off. I've tried waiting it out, since I know there can be an adjustment period visually, and sometimes small UI things I'll stop noticing after a few days, but if anything my migraines are getting worse and all day every day is a no, no thank you, looking at my phone for a couple of minutes makes my head want to explode. There's a lot of lag when scrolling, which is a hardware issue, but the additional dealbreaker is the intense vertigo and headaches the new animations cause. When apps open, they now drop in to the centre of the screen from wherever they are located, which I have alleviated a little by rearranging all my apps to be in the centre three lines so I can somewhat tolerate it - it's still bad, but I can at least open them without feeling like I'm going to throw up. When notifications drop down, they now do a pulsing effect instead of simply... dropping down. This makes me feel sick, every time, without fail. Not everything needs to move, Apple!! Stop!! If I go into accessibility - which I have gone through extensively, trying to change and correct colours, and adjust screen brightness and contrast to no real success - and go into motion to turn off the brain breaking animations, this is not actually accessible at all, because it replaces the animation with a new aperture animation every time you open an app, which is worse.

I use my phone for pretty much everything these days, especially when I haven't been able to open or get on my laptop. I need my eyes to work, or else it makes my vertigo and dizziness worse, and gives me migraines. I now have a very expensive brick, and it's not great!!

It's especially not great when brain is having issues with Overwatch and issues with trying to see if I can tolerate new lightbulbs that I can't determine because it can't tolerate screens of Any Kind due to being so overstimulated that all light on screens seems off. :| I need something to be stable and safe. My options are to either downgrade to a phone that can't get ios26 to get back onto ios18, swap to android, or, as I have just done, plead with my parents to maybe let me have their old iphones (same version as mine) that they fortuitously upgraded just before ios26 came about and should still be on ios18. I am going to have to put everything on the cloud and hope it can pull from that, because I can't do a backup restore to a lower version, and it is going to take days of pain in the interim to fix it, but anything is better than this longterm lmao.

Do not become extremely sensitive to noise and light. It's so infuriatingly disabling.