After extensive testing with and without the feature enabled in iOS 26, I’m going to ask you to turn off Adaptive Power mode.
Experiencing Severe Lag in iOS 26? Turn off Adaptive Power from Settings > Battery Right Now
The moment I installed iOS 26, I enabled Adaptive Power, because it’s a key feature. In fact, it’s turned on by default on iPhone Air and iPhone 17, so it better be doing something, right?
Apple thinks so, at least.
The thing is, I noticed subpar performance in the first couple of days after installing iOS 26. Because my iPhone 15 Pro Max was busy indexing stuff in the background, and apps weren’t updated to take advantage of the new software either. This is absolutely normal.
Slowly and gradually, everything settled down. But not quite.
I noticed how performance would suddenly drop on my iPhone without any obvious reason and just keep on stuttering, lagging, miss touches and swipes from time to time. I had to restart my iPhone at least once a day to fix this.
Honestly, I had no idea what was going on, except that I knew in the back of my head that a feature was constantly running in the background that adjusts performance to save battery life. So why not turn it off, right?
For four days straight, my iPhone was flying through iOS 26 like it was meant to run this particular software update and nothing else. I’ve never ever seen it run this well since I installed iOS 26.
In order to make sure I’m not just getting lucky, I turned on Adaptive Power once more, and my iPhone started to get laggy again, ultimately forcing me to restart it.
Coincidence? I don’t think so.
For the past couple of days, Adaptive Power is off, and my iPhone is sailing through iOS 26 very smoothly. It hasn’t dropped a single frame when rendering Liquid Glass animations or cause any other issue that would be classified as ‘lag.’
If you’re also having issues, it’s best to just turn off Adaptive Power and see if it works out for you too. And I hope it does, because there’s nothing more annoying than a completely unusable iPhone the moment you unlock it.
Keep one thing in mind, Adaptive Power is an iOS 26 feature, and not iPadOS 26.
