Issue with accented characters in filenames on iOS 26 / iPadOS 26

Frank Illenberger

A couple of customers have been running into an issue under iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. It manifests as pianoscope not opening existing or newly created documents. It is connected to file or folder names containing characters accented with diacritics like German umlauts äöü, French vowels éèà, Czech consonants čěňřšž etc.
On my devices it occurs mostly when files are stored on a cloud provider like iCloudDrive or Dropbox. It does not only affect pianoscope but also other document-based apps like for example Pages, Numbers, Keynote etc.
I have reported this issue to Apple.

So what do we do about this? Unfortunately, I have not found a way to work around this in pianoscope. So my current recommendation is:

If you haven't already, don't upgrade to iOS 26 or iPadOS 26.
Don't use accented characters for pianoscope document names or the names of the folders in which you put them.

I will keep you updated on the status of this issue.

Rick

Accented letters work on my iPhone when searching on the phone or iCloud.
I am using iOS public beta 26.1. Perhaps it has been fixed.

Frank Illenberger

Rick I tried it on by beta 26.1 and it still does not work.

MilanDka

Hi. I don’t have this issue on any of my devices – iPhone 11 and iPhone 16. Both are running the latest official version of iOS. Milan.

Frank Illenberger

MilanDka Are you keeping files on iCloudDrive?

MilanDka

Frank Illenberger Yes. I use iCloud – mainly for synchronization between devices, and when changing a device or doing a hard reset, I don’t need to create a backup.

Edit: Hm. It probably doesn’t work. If I open any file with diacritics, the last file remains open.

Frank Illenberger

MilanDka Thanks for testing. This sounds like the problem I observed.

Rick

Update on my diacritics: All my files with ö or ü open OK but if I try to make a new file it won't work. Making a new file without the accented character and then changing to accented later in Files it works as it should.

Frank Illenberger

Rick Thanks for the update. I hope Apple will fix this nasty problem soon.

Rick

Bug seems to have been fixed in iOS 26.1 Beta 4

Rick

Bug seems to have been fixed in iOS 26.1 Beta 4

Frank Illenberger

Rick This it good news. Thanks for testing. I will install the beta as well and try to confirm.

Frank Illenberger

Frank Illenberger I've installed the release candidate of iOS 26.1 on my iPhone 15 Pro which previously had the bug under iOS 26.0.1. Under the new system, I don't have any problems anymore with accented characters in filenames. It seems Apple has fixed this issue with the update.