Since September of 2025, Apple has been changing longstanding norms about how they push updates to our devices, to try and raise adoption rates for Liquid Glass. A lot of us, myself included, believe Apple has been acting deceptively there.
If you, like me, have been trying to stay off Liquid Glass on any of your devices, you should know that Apple recently pushed a new update for iOS 18 users. The update has the iOS 18 icon, but an "Update to iOS 26" label, and then a fuller page which explains that the update will install iOS 18.7.8.
That's just a lie, the phone installs iOS 26 instead.
Reports are that this is happening to other Apple operating systems. I can confirm I get a similar prompt on a device running iPadOS 18. I already got tricked into installing MacOS 26 Tahoe, so I can't personally confirm if something similar comes up for pre-Tahoe MacOS devices.
TLDR: If you don't want Liquid Glass on your Apple devices, ignore the prompts which install a patch release, they are actually installing the major release with Liquid Glass.