Fall brings cooler weather, autumnal color, and new Apple operating systems…and Drafts is ready. The new “Liquid Glass” design required more than the usual number of changes, so while overall the new Drafts is familiar, you may find some things have moved around. If you have trouble reorienting or locating particular functionality, feel free to get in touch.
Some Highlights:
Adoption of Liquid Glass design
Full support for the new iPad multi-window interface
Enhanced menu bar support on iPad
Support for Control Center widgets on macOS and watchOS
More prevalent use of icons in Mac menus
New default app icons.
Noteworthy Changes:
On iPhone, toggling tag visibility is in the Settings menu on the gear at the lower right. This was just a space-saving measure to reduce clutter on smaller screens.
On iOS, the “Workspace Bar” and “Action Group” bar options have been removed. A selection menu is available in their place.
System Requirements
Minimum System Requirements:
iOS 15.6 or greater (no change)
macOS 11.5 or greater (no change)
watchOS 8.5 or greater (no change)
Notable Caveats:
Widgets now require iOS 17 or macOS 14 or greater
Shortcuts integration now requires iOS 17 or macOS 14 or greater
Live Activities now require iOS 18 or greater
Apple Intelligence Integration
Starting with the version 26 releases of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, Apple provides a private, on-device Foundation Models API, which allows apps to integrate with their focused, locally running LLMs. Drafts has provided scripting interfaces to work with these LLMs in actions.
The local models are limited in scope and will not replace more powerful online AIs, but are still useful for a lot of focused tasks, like summarizing and tagging content. For details and example actions, see the AI docs.
New: Better OCR output when importing an image running on iOS 26, thanks to new document comprehension APIs.
New: Workspace visibility options to hide workspaces from menus by platform, or entirely.
Change: When running on OS 26, “Dictate Text” and “Arrange Text” Shortcuts intents no longer require confirmation before opening drafts when a shortcut is run.
Fix: Update Todoist OAuth process to better support changes at their end.
New:Prompt now supports symbolName property that can be set to the string name of any valid SF Symbol name on the system and will place an icon in the prompt header.
iOS
Change: The “Workspace Bar” and “Action Group Bar” which optionally displayed below the drafts and actions lists have been removed. A menu serving the same purpose is available in that location.
New: Editor setting to hide bottom toolbar while editing. Previous option to hide toolbar affects only top toolbar.
Change: Support new, optional theme interface colors:
captionAlternate - falls back to using caption if not defined. Primary use for the timestamp captions in the draft list.
tintToolbar - falls back to using tint if not defined. Used to provide alternate tint color specific to “Liquid Glass” toolbars on iOS 26
Change: Image import OCR improved with new analyzer when running on OS 26.
Mac
New: Add Control Center control support to Mac (when running on macOS 26)
Apple Watch
New: (watchOS 26 only) Add support for Control Center control to jump to capture in Drafts.
Change: Improved batching of changes when communicating with phone to better support very large (hundreds) of items created on Watch while disconnected from phone.
Thank you for the update! I’d like to mention that My widget has become a bit ugly looking in the mix. Without the frame for each of the four buttons, everything looks very unbalanced.
Yes, it’s still inconsistent, but I very much welcome enlarging the icons and making them more bold. I hope the other elements, such as the tiny character/word count and the tag list, which to me is almost unreadable on my phone, will increase in size too.
Select a theme for your widget. Looks like a minor regression in default values when running on iOS <26, but widget colors are all controlled by themes and if you select one you’ll be fine.
On iOS, the “Workspace Bar” and “Action Group” bar options have been removed. A selection menu is available in their place.
any chance to bring back those bar options, even if it’s an opt-in setting? Use them constantly, and the selection menu (even with press and hold) is a little clunky compared to the previous interaction.
On iPhone it would be very helpful for one handed operation if the workspace selector below the Draft lList was available in the lower right corner (instead of the current far left corner).
Just installed Tahoe and came here to say how much I’m already enjoying using Drafts 48. I am the least-observant person so I can’t point to anything specific, but just the overall impression I have is that the updated interface a lot easier on the eye (for me) and a pleasure to use. Thanks again for all you do.
Having trouble installing Drafts 48 on macOS Version 26.0 (25A354). M3 Max.
I had been testing the beta releases of Drafts 48 on the Tahoe developer betas, successfully. Tahoe on this machine is now updated to the public release. A message from Test Flight popped up to say the Drafts beta was no longer valid, so I removed it and stopped Test Flight testing for the Drafts beta.
Despite multiple reboots of the machine, multiple logouts and logins of the App Store, when I try to download Drafts 48 the download immediately quits.
I have successfully downloaded other apps and app updates from the App Store without issues.
