When Apple announced iOS 26 last summer, they said you would finally be able to manually choose which microphone to use. I was thrilled: I could permanently choose the iPhone’s own microphone.
The problem was that whenever I connected AirPods, the iPhone had always switched to their terrible microphone (which should never be used). Every time I needed to record a voice message or dictate something to my phone, I took the AirPods out of my ears so the phone would record with its own, decent microphone.
Anyway, as soon as iOS 26 came out, the first thing I did was switch the microphone to the built-in one and get ready to live happily ever after. But the joy did not last long: after a couple of voice messages, people told me, as usual, that I sounded like shit. From this I concluded that the iPhone had once again switched to the damn AirPods microphone. I went to check, and sure enough:
It had not simply switched back to the AirPods microphone. It had selected a third option, “Automatic”, which stood for the AirPods microphone. I thought that maybe I had made a mistake the first time and tapped “Automatic” myself when it stood for the iPhone microphone without noticing the “Automatic” label? So I went to select the built-in microphone manually again.
And of course, a couple of days later, the selection had reset again and returned to “Automatic”.
What did the authors of this feature thought its value was? Before, the microphone used to be selected automatically. They added a new feature for choosing it manually. But it still knows better and chooses automatically!