I think I had tracked 15+ things I would easily qualify as bugs the first two days after upgrading my phone - this would be absolutely unacceptable where I work, and we aren’t a trillion-dollar company with psychotic hiring standards.
Was this even QAed? I don’t like the look, but that’s a personal thing, these are actual issues that are not subjective.
I think they failed with Apple Intelligence (also a mess, without being useful) and needed something big. So they planned this big design change. When they realized they failed miserably, it was too late to undo it.
Even the design being criticized distracts from fraudulently selling phones based on features never shipped.
It should've been a home run for Apple. ChatGPT starts with zero existing apps, Apple has one of the biggest app ecosystem, and with (Siri) Shortcuts they already have most of the necessary interfaces available for years.
They have your context. OpenAI doesn’t know where you are. It doesn’t know what you bought or when you last called your wife, it can’t know your heart rate or your work schedule.
Apple can turn it around.
Great AI is a good model with lots of context. Your model can be the best, but if you need the user to provide the context it’ll never be a great experience.
After working with Claude code for a while now, I’ve become much more aware of how to convey context to a machine, and just how poor some humans are at doing it in conversation.
Your AI product is toast if you need people to make it work.
If Apple doesn't get their act together with the next iOS release, it could be too late.
It's already possible to connect Gmail, and many other services, this can extend even more. The connection of those services could be done by the iOS/Android apps.
I think it's really annoying and a major reason I have stopped using it even though I was an advocate at first. Apple can't be bothered to invest as much as Google did to have a proper open map system, with a good web version where people/business can post/add data easily. At this point the privacy stick is tiring because we don't get anything from it and they will comply/sell the data the minute they can profit from it anyway (as they have shown).
So, you just end up paying more for a product that is clearly worse and won't become much better because of Apple's ideology and how stingy they are. They generate a lot of cash but are unable to invest it in proper competitive software.
There are many bad things to be said about Google, but at least they manage to serve pretty good software that is open to everyone...
I also live near a large city and a couple of smaller cities with busy downtown areas. In each of them the main streets are virtually impossible to perform a u-turn on because of the large amount of traffic. Apple Maps will insist on giving directions which involve taking u-turns on these streets. Google Maps will instead route you the easier way around the block instead of insisting on an impossible u-turn which in the end is slower because of the difficulty in actually performing the maneuver.
Also I find the directions from Apple Maps when taking an exit which further splits into multiple exits to be highly confusing. The spoken directions from Google Maps is much better in these circumstances.
Every new release I try Apple Maps again just to see if it has gotten better in these circumstances and every release I am disappointed.
- Use dark mode
- Go to wikipedia (or any white page)
- Open the keyboard
- Watch the keyboard start in light mode and then resize very weirdly within its container as it switches to dark mode
Atleast it does on an iphone 12
Set that, and it doesn't use Liquid Glass in your app.
I set it for all my apps. One was designed by a professional designer, who absolutely defecated masonry, when I showed him what it did to our app.
I'm worried that Apple may end up ignoring that flag, and will force us to use LG. That would suck. It says that it's temporary, but I'll bet that Apple will be hating life, if they ignore it.
I'm not freaking out about Liquid Glass, but I don't like it. I completely agree that it is quite unusable.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/BundleResources/In...
- devs are so siloed, nobody knows what’s going on - product is not communicating anything outside of individual fiefdoms - there is zero QA testing - no designers are actually signing off on the final results
…which all seem pretty typical for a large bureaucracy, I guess I just had higher expectations of Apple, since we pay a premium for their products. Some of these bugs are frankly pretty embarrassing.
What I hear about Apple sounds more and more like what I used to hear about Microsoft, especially Microsoft of Ballmer times, when teams inside it clandestinely warred with each other, instead of cooperating.
Apple has this vision-driven culture, and the inclination towards internal secrecy, so that competitors won't steal their thunder. It worked relatively well under Steve Jobs, and whoever he assigned. It worked far less successfully when Jony Ive's ideas of usability made Macbooks into visually more sleek, but less loved devices. Whoever came up with Liquid Glass, has some interesting vision, but the gimmick value in its current implementation seems to dominate, and the usability shortcomings seem to be ignored. Technology-wise, it's half-baked. This means to me that Apple internally not in a good state, the leadership has trouble hearing the voice of reason.
Apple of course has an immense inertia. But giants like Nokia or General Motors also used to have an immense inertia, wads of cash, and dominant market positions.
(Search is comically bad.)
Why does one show up and one doesn’t? The one that doesn’t is a built-in Apple app, too. They both have identical settings for “show app in search”. This worked fine before iOS 26.
I feel that SwiftUI is not ripe. I use it for one of my apps (I have to, in order to use the charts), but it’s too limited to use for anything else.
I actually want SwiftUI to work. I think they have a good idea, but it’s a massive undertaking, and really, breathtakingly ambitious, when you consider what it’s trying to do.
UIKit represents a mature tech that has been refined since 2008, and a lot of that is based on lessons learned, implementing AppKit, which has been around forever (especially if you consider that it came from NeXTSTEP, which probably started in the 1980s). With AutoLayout and UIKit, I can do pretty much anything I want.
Ah yes, let's require all developers scramble to try and fix their apps instead of spending time to actually fix and polish the design system we force down everyone's throats.
On MacOS, it even requires running terminal commands at startup to fix performance regressions.
This is hitting people who aren't tech-savvy particularly hard, and it makes my position as a security advocate ("always update your devices!") hard to maintain. For most people, not updating their devices means they have more reliability and consistency in their devices, because of things like this.
The one good thing with iOS 26 is that Apple reverted their destructive redesign of the iOS 18 Photos app. Maybe they can be hurt enough to revert the destructive redesigns throughout iOS 26.
I hope to some day read a book describing what's been happening at Apple these past few years. It's safe to assume not a single person at Apple thought this was ready to release, and yet it did. This has to be the result of some serious dysfunction as-of-yet not known to the public.
You can't just say that and not share the goods
launchctl setenv CHROME_HEADLESS 1
defaults write -g NSAutoFillHeuristicControllerEnabled -bool falseI don't really see it among family and friends. My parents who are not very technical mostly went shrug, it looks a bit different and went on with their lives. The only family member who said anything about it was our daughter, who likes it a lot.
Agree that Photos is much-improved.
Personally I am not really a fan of liquid glass. On the Mac, I don't notice it much. On the iPhone I find it more noticeable, the primary thing I'm annoyed by is the overlay with video play controls (macOS too). I would rather have seen them invest time into fixing existing issues than a redesign (e.g. why can I not configure Headphone Accommodations on the Mac for AirPods Max, but I can on the iPhone).
It's not like iOS where, once updated, you're generally blocked from ever downgrading back to a previous OS version.
Also compiler performance - People get fed up of "The compiler could not type check the expression in reasonable time" and just say fsck-it and ship broken stuff.
It is one of the reasons that now >40% of apps on iOS/MacOS now use other frameworks - and that percentage is steadily climbing. (I think that number has already crossed 50% recently).
Apple needs to re-invent their UI framework from scratch. Plain old-school MVC worked better.
I'm going to ride iOS 18 and macOS 15 into the sunset and then leave the Apple ecosystem.
Disclaimer: Don't follow Apple or HN a lot. And these opinions are maybe more of my perceptions than facts. Open to corrections.
Increase contrast + reduce transparency did it for me.
That said, it's still comically large, and actually intrudes onto app UI in some cases, especially with scrollbars.
But this...this feels like a symptom of something fundamental inside Apple going wrong.
So, I didn't expect to mind this at all, despite lots of people apparently hating it.
Then I upgraded. And yeah, it's remarkably shitty looking, first time I've agreed with the "haters" for a macOS release. It looks like an above-average GTK theme, which is to say, awful. Plus they found a new and different way to make Safari's tabs look like crap (and I'd swear tab manipulation is super laggy now, where it wasn't before) and this time I can't fix it with a settings toggle. Like, that element specifically looks and feels like it's from a below average GTK theme.
P.S. thank you for using the correct form of “effect”!
I had a MacBook Pro with the touchbar for a little while. I found it to be useless. I do agree if they had left the function keys alone it would have been a much better, or at least less annoying, option.
The reason why I don't want an actual touch screen on my laptop (after using two laptops with one) is because it's just not ergonomic. For one thing, operating it strains the arm very quickly. For another, it means covering the screen with fingerprints, although that's less of an issue with modern ultrabright screens (but sometimes I don't want bright).
A dedicated touchscreen that's located in an area where it's actually convenient to use is a very different story though.
An upright screen that you need to use for lots of input would indeed result in the arm becoming tired quickly. But no one actually uses their touchscreen laptops like that. It’s an additional form of input. Most of the time you still use the keyboard and mouse/trackpad. But it’s very convenient sometimes to reach forward and touch the thing you want to click instead of mousing over to it (especially if you have multiple monitors). It’s also extremely convenient/comfortable for scrolling through long documents if you have a laptop on or near your lap. You rest your hand on the base/your lap/table and scroll with your thumb.
I don’t use the touchscreen on my Windows laptops a ton, but I still use it daily. And I miss it when I use my MacBook.
In any case I think that the MacBook designs are stale and really stuck in the past, for now they only win because of the build quality and the silicon. But competitors are quite close, so if Apple continue with their destruction of macOS there won't many reasons to keep buying.
The point isn't to have the whole system of being able to be used with touch but to allow specific touch interactions depending on the context. It doesn't make sense to have big buttons and menus when you are going to hit them with a mouse/stylus most of the time regardless of touch interactions. This is a problem with all or nothing Apple approaches.
You can already see that with iPadOS: at first the iPad was basically a giant iPhone made mostly for content consumption and the touch only approach made sense because it was optimized to be used conveniently on a couch for relatively simple tasks. But as the hardware evolved and they added stylus support, software has gotten more complex in order to allow more advanced tasks. However, outside of purely artistic endeavor (where you use the table as a canvas to draw on) the UI who still has major focus on being touch centric stop making sense. If you are going to use it as a productivity machine, a keyboard is basically a requirement (why would you want to lose half the screen to display a virtual keyboard in the first place) and a finer pointing device (trackpad/mouse) becomes almost a necessity. At this point you end up having an overblown UI with large touch target that hinders information density/compactness even though you won't use it much that way. It makes the software not as good as it could be and forces poor use of the display space.
You end up in a weird place where the high-end iPads are completely overkill for the typical media consumption tablets were targeting but at the same time it's not a very good productivity device and not just because of the locked down nature of the OS (that only adds insult to the injury) but because it ends up being poorly optimized for that use case.
And this is what I fear they will do with MacBooks: a weird middle ground where you have to deal with the tradeoffs of both interactions methods instead of enabling touch/stylus in the specific parts where it makes sense. There is no need to have macOS fully touch compatible, only to support touch input in specific apps/use case where it makes sense. On top of that, Apple already knows how to transform a device for another use case just with software: in the 2000s they had Front Row, which allowed you to transform a regular Mac into a media center to be used with only a remote. That was just a software layer on top of the standard OS.
With the compatibility of iOS/iPadOS apps on Macs thanks to Apple Silicon, there is no real reason they couldn't just create this type of software layer that could enable fully touch centric use case on top of the regular productivity use case. And keep other parts of the system as they are just using the touch layer for the most commonly known use cases inside of apps (mostly scrolling/navigating, rough selection, etc).
But they don't want to do that because they are trying to sell hardware as much as possible, so they would rather make any given device miss a piece of the puzzle to force buying another device.
As far as I'm concerned, they could have made an iPad/MacBook hybrid for a long time now, where the display part could snap on a keyboard base and change primary interaction method accordingly. They won't because it means a single device could fulfill all the needs for most people who don't need heavy computing power.
In many ways Microsoft approach is actually better/smarter but they are being let down by inferior hardware (and to some extent the general hate on Windows, which is somewhat deserved but not as much as people make it).
To return to my parallel, at first Apple's approach with HiDPI led people to believe that they were ahead but, in the end, it was only a shortcut, requiring specific display resolution/form factor to enable proper integer scaling. It took a while for Microsoft to catch up, but now their solution is more flexible and allows for arbitrary resolutions that enables more different hardware configurations and ultimately use cases.
I feel it's the same problem. Apple is stuck in their ways and cannot let go of the touch centric approach, because this is what Steve Jobs argued for. They completely ignore that this argument was only about a mobile device that you carry in your pocket, where speed and convenience are the primary factors. And indeed, it is exactly what was needed for smartphones to be truly useful. But trying to apply this thinking blindly to every device regardless of their primary mode of use is self-defeating, yet this is what they are hell bent on doing it seems.
I don't think this is atypical, we have color screens for a reason.
Especially widgets are really bad. The widget for my car shows the battery level as a bar chart. During charging it's green, if there is a charging error it's red, when parked it's white/gray. In the glass mode I need to look really hard to see what's happening. All the color coded information is gone. Same for my todo list widget, due items are orange, long overdue items are red. With glass mode on they all look the same.
Back to Linux for me. Ended up ordering a Thinkpad X1 Carbon instead, and am planning to throw Fedora on it.
I disliked the update for a week or so at first, but I have to say I find the liquid animations fun now.
This might be the most harrowing review that you can give without realizing it. UI animations are supposed to get out of the way. If you can recognize them as "fun", the most likely interpretation is that they are forcing you to expend attention, which in this age is one of your most valuable resources.
Luckily I’ve also discovered that you can revert back to “bottom” tab mode in the settings, which brings back something similar to the old UI.
I can’t believe Apple shipped this.
[0] How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface:
0: https://tidbits.com/2025/10/09/how-to-turn-liquid-glass-into...
What are some of the elements that have major impact?
I think it all stems from trying to unify the UX/UI across devices, and to also pull the Vision VR device into that iphone-iPad-MacBook-watch grouping. Handoff and other cross-device interactions suffer when you have significantly different UI elements or interactions.
This Liquid Glass decision is particularly challenging for my tiny startup. We have multiple platforms including iOS and Android. I was hoping to share much of our design language across iOS and Android, but now Apple has essentially decided that this Liquid Glass will be mandatory after a year of support for "compatibility mode" that disables it for your app.
We'll now have to spend expensive engineering time to cater to Apple's design whims rather than actually working on PMF and profitability.
As long as an app is easy to use, people prefer a single look. No one cares about "looking like the OS", except maybe 0.1% of users.
No, people are used to an UI language, which in the case of iOS is quite consistent across applications. You expect certain things to work (e.g. flicking in from the left edge means "go back"). There are platform-specific patterns and I'd rather have the app behave accordingly rather than being consistent with other OS' version. The real 0.1% here are probably the users of your app with active devices in both Android and iOS!
Designing with this in mind annoys the hell out of people in the former group, no doubt. Those people are likely love customizable software so they can make it the same everywhere. It's super common in Linux setups.
And as far as manuals and customer support, what you're saying is that you can't afford to do cross-platform properly, and so you're cutting corners. Which is fine if it's stated explicitly upfront, and having an app that behaves weirdly (for a given platform) is better than no app, but please don't insult your users' intelligence by presenting that as some kind of feature.
There's also the fact that having control over your own apps UI/design language is better over the long term. What if Apple decides to ditch this liquid glass for something else years in the future? They ditched their own design language in iOS7, and now with iOS26 they've done it again.
And the basis for UI redesigns as wide ranging as this are almost entirely nonsensical. Does liquid glass suddenly improve usability by whatever percent? Nope - I guarantee Apple does NOT interrogate or benchmark their UI designs in the same way as NN Group does. Usability is actually hurt by the fact users need to re-learn basic interactions, and existing ones are now slower. Is overall performance improved over the previous version? Absolutely not - performance metrics such as battery life and UI responsiveness have regressed with the over use of visual effects like translucency and minute pixel manipulations. Why bother following changes to a design language when they are not based on real reasoning backed up by actual data or solid logic, and they end up regressing performance to an even worse state? Why should any app vendor be obligated to follow what are ultimately arbitrary and whimsical changes?
Redesigns such as this result in literally more work for the sake of it, zero net improvements and whole lot of wasted effort, all for what? Just to look different for a while, until the next redesign?
They ditched their 30-pin dock with the iPhone 5, and then chucked Lightning in favor of USB-C with the iPhone 15.
UIs have converged enough that the experience is acceptable I guess. And as a devolper, why in the world would I want to write my app for a locked-in ecosystem with a now shitty design-system.
If the only way I interact with a service is a single app then I want that app to blend into my phone. I don't care if the Uber app on Android and iOS are the same, I only see one of them. If I have to use a service on many different platforms, I sometimes prefer having a consistent design language, e.g. I like that Slack has a consistent sidebar interface everywhere. I want to go from the browser to tablet to phone and not have anything in a different spot.
And here's the thing: The Apple users who actually care about this are in the minority. You just get an outsized sampling of them on HN because they tend to be techies as well.
It's time to retire this dead meme. The most successful SAASes in the world are just websites that people pay for hand-over-fist regardless of what OS they use. Netflix doesn't use Liquid Glass, Spotify doesn't bother. Google Docs isn't going to inherit it and probably neither will Office 365. Websites online by-and-large won't adopt this design either.
The ideal of everyone taking the time to make a sexy native UI is appealing. But it's never going to fully be realized, especially when OEMs resist basic A11Y obligations and insist on battery-draining eye candy.
It takes much more time to make your own custom UI, and then fix it every major update that breaks it somehow.
You can get a nice looking UI by just using stock components with minimal configuration and then you basically get platform UI refreshes for free.
It's basically negligent to insist on native apps, if profitability is your goal. I love native interfaces too, but the staunch belief in businesses being a "good native citizen" is a dead meme. It's cart-before-horse logic, we don't ever see anyone commit to the idea and reap real rewards. Native platforms punish you for playing by the rules.
Integrate into each OS as much as you can.
And it’s easy to see in websites since no one uses the base system design for ui.
The new UI breaks existing conventions, and isn't even self-consistent. You're not helping users by jumping into that chaos.
What exactly does this mean? Are there references in Apples design guide lines that explain this in more details? (Or wherever this would be documented)
This is the full release version ios26 which we will be living with for at least one year
You should not expect any change in design at that stage normally I guess, but I'm still seeing aesthetic differences, for example the shine around icons is reduced.
Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Reduce Transparency
Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Increase Contrast
Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Differentiate Without Colour
Settings > Accessibility > Motion > Reduce Motion
Settings > Accessibility > Motion > Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions
Bugs aren't always NPEs. Business Logic bugs are still bugs.
Features like Night Shift also happen to reduce contrast. That doesn’t mean they are buggy, or that Increase Contrast is buggy.
It does mean that Reduce Transparency is not suitable if you don’t want reductions in contrast compared to regular-transparency Liquid Glass, regardless of whether you also use Increase Contrast.
I do agree that Liquid Glass as a whole is broken for anyone needing a higher-contrast UI. In my opinion, a GUI should be reasonably high-contrast by default, without special accessibility settings.
* My home screen wallpaper is a blurred version of the astronomy lock screen. After enabling Reduce Transparency, it remains working for ten minutes or so, then gets replaced with a plain black background.
* Websites have a large bottom margin (usually white, sometimes site specific colours) where the toolbar appears if you scroll up. It feels like a complete waste of screen space if you're scrolling down a webpage to read it.
Tested on an iPhone 16 Pro Max 256GB.
Searching for "Accessories", "General" works, but for some reason no hits for "Accessibility". I can't for the love of god figure out why would this be the case, is it just a mistake that no one caught, or is it an intentional decision, why would this be intentional?
Also, I appreciate the UX improvements (as opposed to the pretty glass effect), such as the much improved menu system and the generally (IMO) improved changes in layout in Calendar, Mail, Safari, etc.
That said I do find it a bit more annoying to access different tabs in Safari but maybe that's why I get for using Safari.
When I tried to get Aero Glass into Linux themes, I found plenty of existing transparency-oriented themes, but all of them made Microsoft's decision to use frosted glass more obvious. There's a balance between the shininess and opacity that needs to be dialed down for the look to both look good and be clear.
I think Apple went too far with making their theme look shiny. I assume (hope) a 26.1 update coming out in a few months to tweak the UI and fix a lot of the usability issues.
As for the weird design choices around Safari: I've always found Safari's UI to be one of the most confusing parts of iOS. It was never quite obvious to me what menu I would need to hit to get to what feature. I think removing the tab button is a step backwards for sure, but with my normal struggle to use it, I've barely noticed it to be honest. I find the button as easy to find as I do most Safari buttons, and that includes previous versions.
macOS seems particularly bad for built-in software, though. It seems like Apple changed the look of standard list boxes/navigation panels/whatever they call the menu on the left, and a lot of built-in macOS applications look terrible when multiple of these panes are placed near each other.
Yet.
This design is really punitive for older, tireder eyes and they really need to learn not to do this. Because their audience gets older all the time (as the population in all western countries does).
Their design team is evidently skewed young again, and needs to really learn about how ageing affects eyesight for absolutely everyone. It is insane to put everyone over about 50 into an accessibility category, but eyesight ageing is one of the things that can't be held back.
accessibility != for the disabled, and apple used to champion that principle.
What's good for someone with eyesight problems is also good for a young person standing outside under the sun's glare. What's useful for a one-handed person will also serve you when you're carrying your toddler in one hand. A silence compartment on a train might make you effectively deaf for a while, a hangover or a night of bad sleep might make your attention sink, and so on.
We're all somewhere on the spectrum, and most importantly, where in the spectrum we are changes frequently during the day. That's why it's so important for all interfaces to be accessible by default rather than having a buried switch somewhere.
So far, accessing Safari tabs to close takes an extra tap, but that's counteracted somewhat by the New tab / private tab options. And keyboard doesn't pop up consistently when replying to emails in Outlook. Might be related to SwiftKey or just a bug in that app. Aside from that I'm pretty happy with the ux.
Even with transparency on its gotten much better than the early betas, which is good, since that is the happy code path and gets more testing coverage.
They are certainly overwhelmed by the problems caused by the terrible visual design, which does not accomplish its stated goals and usually is a very large setback compared to what we had previously.
The glass effects are fancy, but in a HUGE percentage of places the transparency makes things worse.
A lot of the animation/liviness, the “liquid” part of “Liquid Glass”, is very nice and welcome.
My problems are almost all from:
1. difficulty reading/using things since the background shows through unnecessarily and makes things hard to read
2. iOS fighting to change the color of things to keep up with the background during scrolling, all for the stupid effect I just complained about
3. far more wasted space by pulling away from the edges of the screen leaving less useful area
I’ve seen people theorize it will all be great and make sense when some future iPhone with a true edge to edge screen launches.
Great. My new phone was made manifestly worse to help the experience of a phone that I can’t even buy yet. If it exists at all. And that’s why this design is the way it is.
I don’t know how they saved this. Other than just getting rid of some of the fundamental concepts. But they’re gonna have to tone a lot of stuff WAY down in the next few years to try and get this back to usable.
I’m sure we’ll all get used to it. Just like we got used to a lot of the problems that the iOS 7 redesign brought.
But that doesn’t mean we’re actually moving forward and getting better. We seem to be finding new ways to get worse.
You can look at screenshots of OS X 10.4 or 10.6 and they’re incredibly easy to read. They have good information density. You know what the controls are and things haven’t been hidden like scroll bars.
Yeah there were excesses with iOS 6 and below. And the pixel perfect layout stuff was never going to be viable long-term as phones kept changing size every year or two.
But you could tell what was a button and what wasn’t. You knew if something was just text or a field you could edit. We’ve lost that.
Similarly I’m not a Windows fan. I used it for decades but I’m happier with the way the Mac works. I’ve used Linux, the various GUIs are fine and just like Windows I could live with them. But the Mac works better for me.
So as they destroy both platforms I’m stuck with nowhere to go. It’s not like Windows is getting better.
Though I would probably go to Linux first, just for the Unix guts.
That made a world of difference for me.
This could be significant improvement if Apple let us choose the transparency percentage.
I’ve used only iPhones as my main devices since the iPhone 3G but instead of getting a 17 Pro I’ve bought a Pixel 9 Pro and will switch my main mobile to GrapheneOS.
Siri was broken for me for the first few days but suddenly began working again! That was frustrating, but I'm happy it's back. I have no clue what fixed it because it wasn't a software update.
I downgraded about 10 minutes after trying iOS 26. Sorry to all who missed the window.
It’s only when you’re already on iOS 26 that you can’t downgrade anymore.
At a certain part they stop signing the OS. At that point because it doesn’t have the cryptographic signature you can’t install it at all and your only choice is something newer.
With point releases or security updates that tends to be pretty fast because they don’t want people downgrading to something vulnerable. When going from iOS X to iOS X + 1 grace period is usually longer before they stop that.
And, of course, if you try and install an iOS 26 backup on the phone that you just moved back to 18… you’re just gonna be on 26 again. So you better make sure you have the right back up.
But you can turn that stuff off. They may try to trick you so you have to remain somewhat vigilant. But I don’t think they ever absolutely force you to upgrade.
I also agree that they didn’t test it on smaller screens, there are lots of cases where things don’t quite fit right.
I’ve been wanting a better camera for a little while, I guess it’s time to adjust to something bigger :\
I really hope Apple will address this in a dot-upgrade later this year, but I am afraid that the market share of the 12 and 13 models are too low for them to justify this.
I haven't upgraded it to iOS 26 / Liquid Glass, though, and given what I'm seeing/hearing, I don't plan to.
Yesterday, for the first time since I bought the phone, it died on me before 18:00 with regular usage. I used to charge everyday when I go to bed with around 15-25% left, now I can't even finish the work day.
Why would anybody want that?
I actually feel a warm computer now, something that I have never experienced in five years of having this M1 MacBook.
This takes amazing hardware and degrades it to Windows laptop slop.
In the Jobs days, at least one VP head would roll for this, and Apple would be far better off for it. I don't think Tim Cook is strong enough for that though.
#!/bin/bash launchctl setenv CHROME_HEADLESS 1 defaults write -g NSAutoFillHeuristicControllerEnabled -bool false
This removes drop shadows on Chromium / Electron, and removes an autofill overlay that people reported heavy battery use on. I took this from somewhere on the internet.
Of course it makes everything look dull and primitive. Crammed and misaligned controls are even more obvious when elements have borders. You still have unhelpful animations.
The safari changes are the worst part.
26 is definitely not for older devices. Heck, 26 is probably not for any device, this article makes UX look like crap.
IMO, this is 99% typical "not what I'm used to" internet rage. Upgrade and enjoy.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120614042824/http://blogs.msdn...
--
"Cheesy and dated" -- it keeps hitting me through the years.
Metro was also just pretty bad on its own, irrespective of what came before or after. It was way too simplified, and despite that everything was HUGE so you could really see every bit of detail that was taken away. As usual, Microsoft was chasing the big new thing that never came by designing half the OS around tablet PCs. Windows 10 toned it down like how 7 toned down on Vista, and after that it was pretty alright for me. A much better example of a UI that came out then and aged well was Android 5 with Material Design.
This was a late 90s/early 2000s thing. I remember it on some Win98 and XP applications.
[0] https://i.redd.it/9fhcm9ce0ao21.jpg
[1] https://klanghelm.com/assets/img/VUMT/VUMT-2-solo-full.jpg
Gen Z like it because of nostalgia, not because of quality or because it actually looks any good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plasma_Workspaces.png - ugh.
It was especially confusing at the time because Windows XP was so straightforward and correct. Flat, contrast-heavy UI elements that overlap without interacting when they aren't supposed to. Drop shadows used for good instead of evil. Skeumorphic design elements that are intuitive, not desperate and corny. The cutting edge in PC usability is arguably still technology designed in 2003.
There's always "old wine in new bottle", but this latest take by Apple seems a bit too gratuitous.
Time will tell whether it's a flop -- I'm inclined to believe this is evidence that they're on par with MS now, and their solidly creative streak is over.
Now when I try to hit send in messages I often have to hit it twice because it has to show the dumb flash which requires a longer delay than I’m used to in order to register the send. There is no aspect the redeems it and many that damn it.
I strongly dislike Liquid Glass and would avoid upgrading for as long as possible. I would also delay updating both my personal and my work apps for the new design language. It is a massive usability downgrade, and it undoes all the effort I put into implementing accessibility related features in my apps. The negative sentiment has also been universally shared among my colleagues and other iOS devs I've talked about.
It is a major factor why I decided to skip an iPhone update for another year. I'd rather continue using my older device despite its dwindling battery life than be forced to use glass-based iOS version. Together with Apple's adversarial attitude to the regulation compliance in EU, its become increasingly more difficult to find any excitement in my dev job, and I find myself spending more and more time with my Linux desktop over my MBP.
And there are some stupidly obvious bugs - like the WEATHER header in the weather app is black on a dark background.
And the way the buttons at the bottom of the page are tight up against the content instead of being centred in the space under it.
It reeks of design-for-resume-padding instead of design-for-user-delight.
Does Reduce Motion (under Accessibility) not work? I haven't updated to 26 yet, and probably won't for a while.
I tried to minimize the horrible glass design as much as possible because they couldn't see the text bleeding through the background. In my opinion, Liquid Glass is the worst design I have ever seen. It looks like a crappy GeoCities design from 1999. The team who designed it should be fired and replaced with people who priorities a professional appearance and usability.
Eh, I disagree about who should be fired. The designers and implementers are not (necessarily) the ones who decided it was their job. As far as I know, and probably depending on department, Apple internally works in annual cycles and sort of decides what the mission is up front. Any designer or engineer voluntarily taking on what was probably the inane grandiose idea of a higher-up should be commended for their ambition even if they knew it wouldn't go. More likely (imo) people are working on what the company has decided they work on, and the people trying to make it work are grinding themselves down in service of that goal and keeping their jobs in a crazy economic time.
Scott Forstall was the one to be fired for having basically bad taste with regard to iOS6 (as far as people knew outside the company), which was the right move if anyone was to be.
In this case, it's whoever made the call to try and overhaul multiple OS' in this way in the span of probably a year or two, and who clearly didn't prepare sufficient escape hatches or internal feedback mechanisms for the project. The people working on it are just working on it, and sometimes you gotta grit your teeth and try to make something happen that every part of you knows won't happen.
As an analogy, any iOS or Mac developer knows XCode sucks, but we shouldn't go calling for the XCode team to be fired, because the current team are basically the museum curators and it would be stupid to try and overhaul a 20-30 year old insanely complex critical piece of infrastructure like that in any short period of time without massively disrupting everyone who relies on those tools. Improvements and refactors need to be relatively conservative from an end user's perspective, and aligned with business goals from the company's perspective. To fire them would imply they're actively deciding not to make it better at the lowest levels, but it's doubtful to me that they have the power, time, or resources allocated to them to do that. If they were to be given the go-ahead to do that, they'd probably at best produce as effective of a result as the team who were tasked with redesigning all of the OS' this year and given no way around launching it in alpha. In that case, it would be more fruitful to be mad that Apple isn't investing in a better newer alternative development experience or editor while XCode chugs along, and likewise with OS26, we should be vocally annoyed at the initiative, timeline, and arrogance of releasing it in this state, but the team is probably doing their best at this point to incrementally improve what is probably to them a failed project on a massive scale that they didn't likely have much of an option to commit themselves to.
The dev team immediately hated it, but despite the internal feedback, it was pushed into the public beta, where it turned out that users hated it also. The higher ups behind that decision first tried to push back by writing some aggressive blog posts about how everyone is "holding it wrong", citing internal UX studies on how it actually improved everything etc. That got even more angry comments.
And then it turned out that the devs have quietly snuck in a hidden setting - a registry key - that reverted the change. This was leaked to the public, and spread like wildfire.
In VS 2013, they officially made that an option. In VS 2015 (IIRC), they changed the default to match the original behavior.
Putting aside the fact that, yes, there are a few issues with the way Liquid Glass is implemented currently (nothing that can't be iterated on over the next few releases), I will say that some of the critics use really silly examples to prove their point. The messages screenshot would have looked a proper mess on iOS 18! Some of the text on text blur screenshots is showing text where it's not even in the zone of focus. It's merely showing blurred text where previously it would have been obscured by the UI. To me it shows that there is more to scroll for content as opposed to trying to read from that part of the screen.
And on X I've seen many critics use screenshots where the animation is halfway complete to criticise the legibility (often seen screenshots of the Notification Centre being screenshotted when halfway down where the background isn't fully blurred).
I think there's a lot to criticise on Liquid Glass. Some of these examples just doesn't feel like a fair critique of it.
I started off thinking that the design was ugly (the reflections made it look kinda plastic) but came to like the fluidity after about a month. And I like the push away from custom fonts and colors, which software designers obsess way too much upon.
I still remember Win7 Aero fondly and I really wanted to like Liquid Glass. I had to turn it off as soon as I saw what happened to the notification drawer.
I converted a 2019 5k iMac to work as an external display a few years ago, and the extra screen real estate was a massive QoL improvement. But with Tahoe, it feels like I'm back on a smaller res monitor with the window chrome taking up a lot more space (I live in Safari and it feels massively different on here, especially with the larger tab bar).
Nowadays I feel that the quality of iOS has slipped, so will wait for 26.1 first.
Why can´t Apple allow for a setting to 100% disable this bad idea of an UI/UX experience? How much drugs do you need to consume, in order to assume that people who use a computer for professional work want this interface?
What was the user requirement for it? "lets waste as much UI as possible and make it very, very hard to work on Mac OS!"
Who approves this kind of bad UI/UX?
Aesthetics aside (which I personally don’t like, but I can accept as subjective) I see extreme issues and regressions literally everywhere, from not being able to read the notifications in a half pulled curtain to memory leaks in half the native apps.
Yet no one is raising their voice in the tech world. No bloggers, no YouTubers, nothing that feels proportionate to the screwup I’m seeing. People was far more vocal about the lack of the new Siri.
But yes agreed, it is mind-boggling to me how broadly well-received this has been
I used split view quite often, but I never use the new window management. I just store away my iPad more often now and use my PC instead.
The issue is that most people don't use iPads with keyboards. The windowing system in this case is then an absolute nightmare compared to what came before, as touch-based users were clearly a distant second thought when designing it.
For any HNers who don't have access to iPads running iPadOS 26 / 18, and aren't sure if this is just the "people on the internet hating new things" reflex (it really isn't), here's a side-by-side comparison that clearly illustrates andix's point[1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/iPadOS/comments/1mq8sgd/old_split_v...
I don't think it's "an issue" that I use an iPad without mouse and keyboard most of the time. Last time I checked the iPad was designed as a touch device.
Although regarding your final sentence - I don't think Apple even knows what the iPad is supposed to be any more. It seems execs completely lack any kind of product vision. And given both the tackiness of Liquid Glass and the various insulting ad campaigns that have trickled out over the past few years - they also clearly lack taste. In other words, Apple is Just Another Tech Company now.
I would claim this is mostly unrelated to 26, and more related to .0. All the tech people that I know, who have experience with Apple OS releases, wait until .1 release to upgrade, for this reason. .0 are always a shit-show, since my first Apple device over 10 years ago. I see .0 as a public beta, and that's what I expect whenever I do decide to install them. I suspect there's some truth to this, where they don't have time to fix everything found in the actual beta.
I've actually been part of public betas for many years, and this is the only one where I've felt launch day approach with growing concern, as it was clear nothing was remotely close to shippable.
There wasn't even a clear direction, as most of the fixes have just been reducing glass around the UI, and it's very telling that the only way they've found so far to make the new design language work is to roll it back as much as they can without losing face.
When friends ask in person I can just pull the phone and find bugs. Not ones that I previously know, new ones each time just by paying a bit of attention.
The most glaring non aesthetic ones are memory leaks affecting native macOS apps, missed alarms and a very frequent one for iOS where unlocking the phone leads to an empty screen.
I also have one in safari where what seems like a misplaced dark fade covers the top third of the screen. The safari url bar tends to show empty or reappear wrongly as well.
Also the memory leak issue isn’t due to Liquid Glass and it’s not something you’ll find just by grabbing someone’s phone and running an app.
I suggest to check the comments in this 12 years old thread [1], replace version number 7 with 26 there and realise that some things never change
Some subset of users like re-learning how to do the same basic things in a new way, such as switching browser tabs, but most people want to spend ~0 time on that stuff and get justified annoyed when it's pushed on them.
Of course over time people will get used to the new design, but even if the new one is materially worse what are people going to do? It's not like Apple cares that much about random user opinion and the joy of a monopoly or duopoly is that the companies controlling one don't have all that much incentive to keep people happy.
It's just that people get used to bad software.
Or that it improves silently between several versions. Or that it just keeps getting worse, and people are justified every time.
I don't know a lot about Apple. Android seems to be partially at each of those camps.
What's really bad about this is that we (as in the software industry) have managed to teach people to hate updates, and a significant part of that is all the gratuitous changes to established UI flows. Many casual users dread updates now because they just want their shit to keep working like it always did. And this is how you end up with unpatched security issues.
I don’t understand why usability experts’ website has worse experience than 90% of the web?
Plus, I’m ten years older (ten years more experienced) now, and I’m very sceptical that is being some vision. That is rather being a great failure, but since the company basically in the same position as Microsoft with their Windows, they don’t feel they’ll lose their customers, as most of them are willing to give Apple this benefit of the doubt. Then they’ll have at least a couple of years to do something about it.
Luckily, Apple is ok at supporting older phones, so I just have to be careful to not accidentally upgrade my SE to iOS 26.
Makes me nostalgic for Apple's interface guidelines, which were very well thought through, based on evidence, and with clear principles. https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/Human_Interface_Guidel...
However, this doesn't work if you've scrolled down already and the bar is minimized. It literally flashes as if to acknowledge your swipe and does nothing.
Also if you miss by moving your thumb just slightly lower, you'll close the app haha.
They thought about it a bit, but definitely not enough.
Even long time friends who are iOS fanatics, and who have used iOS since the beginning are often surprised when I show them a new gesture I’ve learnt. Am I missing something? I’m really grateful to learn this now but I can’t imagine the “Apple way” is to stumble upon these by forum comments?
But, as you suggest, you have to tap the url to "bring it up" so it can be safely dragged upward, which is annoying. If they polish this a bit, I think it will be very nice.
If you have to have an invisible language, put it in a man page somewhere or something. I really don't like having my train of thought interrupted by "HEY, learn something new RIGHT NOW"
Safari isn't in there, but that would be the place to put it.
You won’t be receiving any updates for iOS 18 after December or so, if your device supports iOS 26. Only the iPhone XR and XS will be receiving further iOS 18 updates, because they don’t support iOS 26. That has been Apple’s policy for many years now. Only devices that dropped out of major iOS updates receive minor updates to older iOS versions. The same minor updates are not made available to iPhone models that support a newer major version.
The lock screen clock went from "can read in a split second" to "wait what number is this?".
Luckily there was a setting for that one.
This actually perfectly describes my frustration with Apple products. They make a lot of decisions I don't like and provide no way to control them.
If only the iPhone "menu bar" designers took that to heart. It is insane that I have to put on glasses to read the time when there is plenty of room to increase the damn font, but no option to do so.
I am gonna be LMAO when all these youngster UI designers age up to the point where they have to wear readers to use their crap UI.
iOS 7's primary failure was that in ditching skeuomorphism (which wasn't entirely the wrong idea), it went too far and lost visual metaphor, not to mention most of the delightfulness and genuine beauty) Visual metaphor is the link between form and function.
iOS 26 and macOS 26 fails because they prioritize the "liquid glass" idea such that function is forced to follow form, not the other way around. Hence there's a lot of hard-to-read text, hard-to-discern visual boundaries, and big ugly one-off compromises (like the Music.app controls in the Songs grid view placed on top of the grid itself, with some transparency).
I find it unacceptable that people pay that kind of money for iPhones and iPads etc and have to deal with bugs, bubbles, readability issues with a theme that looks like a terrible 2011 android skin. And that’s a trillion dollar company.
Staying on 18, till iPhone dies.
After more than a decade, I'm seriously considering to switch back to Android again. Also because Apple doesn't want to release some features in the EU, they prefer picking a fight with the regulators. Fine with me, but they have to be okay with us not buying Apple products anymore.
Same. iOS 26 and Tahoe completely rule out me purchasing. I cannot believe this shipped.
iOS 26 is terrible on it. They decided to use gray as their selection color where it used to be a blue outline. So now I need to, while driving, visually hunt for a gray color to see what im about to select.
Even worse the gray color can either be the background of a target OR a border around the target, it's not consistent.
It totally boggles my mind that somebody thought this was good idea.
It made me wonder if the whining is less about the particulars of liquid glass (I mean, remember the aquagel days of early mac os x), and more of lamenting the unification of design. I personally, just do not believe that there is a design aesthetic where form<->function have a balanced interplay, and users of 8K desktop screens and handheld iPhones are going to want the exact same experience. Similiarities maybe. But not the same thing.
It went too far (I think the subdued Aqua of 10.9 was peak), but no where near as bad as Glarse.
So many people treat things that just work and are stable as “stale” and “unexciting” and demand change for change’s sake, rather than actual measurable improvement.
Liquid Glass is genuinely objectively atrocious on multiple metrics like text readability.
I’ll be sticking with the previous iOS / MacOS versions as long as possible.
Another issue is that even if you increase the text size in Accessibility settings, FaceTime controls are still tiny.
Another problem is talking over each other on FaceTime. I have to be careful about when I speak because if we speak simultaneously, the voice cuts. I’ve noticed this problem for years, but I know it wasn’t always the case until some recent iOS updates.
I believe if Apple allowed us to customize which buttons appeared where, it would make FaceTime much more pleasant for many people!
Chose worst-case images to make Messages look as bad as possible.
Same with the stacked, floating UI items.
And the "search bar" change causing us to re-learn habits? NOT TRUE. The old way works too; but now there's a discoverable alternative.
I've always found Google's decision to include mid-tier SoCs into their flagship phones risky as it makes performance hitches for future updates much more obvious. If/when Google copies Liquid Glass into the next version of Material Design, I'm sure my phone will suffer from a performance hit too.
That said, scrolling HN still works fine on hardware from a decade ago, so there's got to be more to this. I've personally had custom ROMs experience random lags and slowdowns after major upgrades (which is probably why many ROMs claim it doesn't work and don't support it) and I wouldn't be surprised if the Android upgrade hit a similar issue on your phone. As a last resort before buying a new phone, doing a factory reset may make the new OS more usable on your device. Not the right solution (fixes from Google's side to prevent such issues would be right solution), but it might work and it's cheaper than a new phone.
Also I now have this instinctive feeling that every time I upgrade iOS on my devices, the battery is going to get hammered a bit more.
I would love it if they did for iOS what they did for Mac OS Snow Leopard - no new features, just performance improvements on the existing software.
Of course it might cannibalise iOS device sales, but maybe (just maybe), it would result in improved customer loyalty and commitment to Apple - not just for their hardware but also their software. A case of long-term gains over short-term targets.
Why do I need to watch a mini video to have UI controls appear? It's incredibly annoying.
My Linux install feels so much faster than Windows or OSX and the main reason is that it's not filled with a bunch of useless, slow animation.
On macOS you can speed up/disable the animations using some hidden defaults (you can easily find that on the internet).
Personally I like the animations; I find them well-done on macOS. They serve a purpose but are not “too much” either IMHO.
I’ve subjectively had battery life regressions for most iOS updates until the first minor version update or so, but that might also just have correlated with extensive re-indexing of Photos and things like that.
It feels like Apple is catering for the lowest common denominator, people who only use technology to do social media and photos, a bit like those mediocre books with a gigantic font size that end up being a gazillions pages and a pain to handle even though there isn't much to read after all.
Apple is just trying too hard to be fashionable instead of being a company dedicated to good technology. Bicycle for the mind no more...
This seems to be a spinoff of the tendency to put controls on top of vertical video. Amusingly, just as design is focusing on vertical layout, folding phones are coming in.
Its made my 12 pro max noticeably laggier though, which I'm definitely not a fan of..
OP seems to even deliberately choose a stupid message background just to prove his/her point. Of course, there's a lot of backgrounds to choose from.
I don't like transparency, backgrounds, or (most) animations anymore.
That said, I'm used to Liquid Glass now and I don't much care either way anymore. It's just not a big deal to me.
I think you'll quickly realize that static text content has a much more appreciable "reader mode" quality that isn't a slog to look at. There's oodles of colorslop in Liquid Glass that serves no purpose but to distract the user. Don't lose readers (or god forbid, conversions) just because you're trying to toe this line.
Back then, I was sure Apple's designers (who I would see as very competent) would course-correct. What has been shown clearly was a "mood trailer" to me. Actually implementing this design would surely make them understand that they would need to dial back some of those effects for readability.
For a while, they seemed to have done that, utilizing frosted glass more than in the initial trailers. Recent betas however seemed like they are slowly converting back to full-glass with all the known usability issues.
I really don't know who at Apple thought "dark text on almost fully transparent button with dark background" was a good idea.
[1] https://laura.media/blog/liquid-glass-is-unreadable-now-what...
Never in my life using iOS have I seen the animation for a click but have the click not “register”/happen. That’s something I’ve experienced on multiple flavors of Android OS.
Just today I long-pressed on an image in Safari, it brought up the context menu, and I clicked “Save to Images” (or whatever it’s called). There was a glass outline around that option and it looked “pressed” but nothing happened. I clicked again and it worked. I’ve never had such buggy behavior for simple interactions.
And lest anyone blame my hardware, it’s a 17 Pro Max.
I can’t speak for people with visual impairments, but for me, many of the effects actually work, and I appreciate the on average larger hit targets.
Some things, like the little icons inline of some macOS menu bar items, actually make it easier to quickly spot a given option in a long list to me.
Turning on "Reduce Transparency" and "Increase Contrast" under Accessibility > Display makes the phone a pleasure to use.
I'd really, really love to read internal presentations leading up to this downgrade of a once proud UI (let's hear it for System 7) to what is now effectively a collection childish digital baubles.
It seems like it
a) Annoys users when their devices change out from under them.
b) Reduces the incentive to buy the new thing with the new fashionable update.
Anyone have any idea why the business case works out the way it does?
If you want high contrast in your messages app...don't use a high contrast background image?
Why would anybody want this?
I see like 3-5 UI bugs a day in iOS 26. Liquid ass, indeed. Some apple product VP really wanted to be the next Steve Jobs, took 4 steps backwards instead.
I'll probably end up switching to android eventually, and I am bummed about it bc I am an apple fan boy and I like the ecosystem.
It sounds that companies are sending you spam via RCS, something that seems to be a problem in countries like India. But that's not exactly a Samsung or Android problem and you can always disable RCS.
- One the homescreen seeing the search as a clear button is useful for most users. The swipe down is just not easy to find and remember. The dots shown when swiping through homescreens is actually much clearer if you don't have so many pages.
- Same goes for the pull down search bar. It took me a long time to remember that. And then in the system settings it always took me some time to find it again. That it's the same gesture as reload in other apps made it even more confusing. Now it's right where you thumb is.
- The pulsating buttons - I haven't even seen them. And I switch during the public beta phase. Normally buttons get hidden by your thumb when you press them.
- And then yeah a lot of things look different now. We had that before when we switch to the previous design language and people were just complaining as much.
There are now portions of iOS that use either iOS 18's UIKit, or iOS 26's Liquid Glass UI in apps.
It feels like Apple is having a Windows moment with their operating systems for the jarring combination of old and new UI designs sitting next to each other and it's gross. I hate it.
It feels like they pulled this out of their ass last minute after the AI siri failures, they had to have something to put out for 2025.
I actually don't mind it on iPhone outside of the bugs and inconsitencies, but it's attrocious on macOS and the new iPad windowing was obviously made with zero consideration for touch-first users and was only made to cater to the whiners about iPad needing to become more mac-like.
Just poorly though out all around.
.. or by definition, Apple is having an Apple moment :)
However, I am a huge fan of buttons being visually buttons again. Flat design was a poor UI in my opinion. It's nice that I can distinguish what can be pressed again!
Then Jony Ive left and it seemed like sanity was on its way back. But here we are again.
Just like those glass flowers on one of Lisbon train stations, Oriente, that might look beautiful, yet are perfectly useless on heavy rainy days forcing everyone to only go up to the platform shortly before the train arrives.
Meanwhile linux people are removing buttons, window borders entirely, sometimes removing colors too, it's glorious.
I also notice that CarPlay has more contrast now, and not much Liquid Glass. Kinda telling.
It was already bad because you can't use Shortcuts to launch a specific profile, or set the default profile to use, but now it's so cumbersome, it's become mission impossible to use.
This is how it worked on OG iTunes. (Did it also scroll on the iPod?)
- the padding is kind of ridiculous and wastes a lot of space
- it gets in the way of my content a lot, which is the opposite of the proclaimed intention
The human eye was not designed to look at text or to look at text on top of solid color static backgrounds which don’t exist in nature.
Our eye was designed to look at noise and filter moving noise. It is better to have a background that distinguishes itself based off of texture and movement rather than a sudden contrast of divergent flat colors.
Yes flat design is logically more efficient I understand this but human evolution has evolved our bodies to be narrow and efficient within a niche. If we move outside of that niche things become inefficient even detrimental.
Take for instance: eating. You’re not designed to eat the most calorie dense fatty foods even though high energy reserves seems like a good thing. Your body ended up evolving towards a niche: a narrow band of caloric intake.
It’s the same thing with visual design. You go too extreme and too efficient with flat colors and flat design you are creating patterns your eye was not optimized for. Your eye was optimized for noise inefficiency and to find patterns and glass emulates this quite well.
To be honest I just made up all the shit I said above. I somewhat believe it could be true but the ultimate reality is that it doesn’t matter that much. Your eye can handle flat design or Liquid Glass without any extra stress. It’s not really a big difference. Your eye can handle it and if you can’t you probably shouldn’t be driving and you should see an eye doctor. People are complaining about this because it’s different from what they are used to not because there’s an actual problem.
You could have used the time to type up that comment on the basics of visual design, and saved us all some sanity.
For hundreds of years, humans have been studying light, color, and shadows. All the way from the cave painters to great maters (da vinci) to modern UI/UX pioneers. There are absolutely things that do not work well (example: visual vibration -https://accessibility.psu.edu/color/brightcolors/) and there are combinations that work well.
So no, it isnt your eye. And you dont need to see an eye doctor. The person/team/company that designed it fell short of the mark.
For hundreds of years humans have got it wrong. The basics of visual design are made up qualitative guidelines with no solid metrics to back it up. Just a bunch of arbitrary rules with legit sounding words and rules to dress it up as a science.
Take for example the primary colors. RYB. Completely ass wrong for hundreds of years. Our eyes achieve color ranges by mixing RGB. RYB is an arbitrary choice.
You've been drinking the koolaid.
> There are absolutely things that do not work well
Did I say there wasn't? What are you going off about here?
>So no, it isnt your eye. And you dont need to see an eye doctor. The person/team/company that designed it fell short of the mark.
So you're saying Apple really fucked their entire company over with liquid glass? Really? Let's be real. People can't use their phones anymore because the GUI is so terrible? It's so bad everyone is going back to windows and android?
Wake up man. It's a band wagon and you're getting on it; destination: Not reality.
> So you're saying Apple really fucked their entire company over with liquid glass
I dont know what you're trying to say. Are you saying Apple alone is enlightened enough to know what's good and what's not? And every body else is winging it?
Nope. I'm saying everybody is winging it. Nobody knows what they are talking about. Including apple and you.
The only people who know what they are talking about are the people saying that nobody knows what they are talking about.
This has been the case for several years now (started in iOS 16 IIRC); it is not new in 26.
There’s very little Apple can do to prevent that at this point because the way Apple operates, with its hardware only running its own software and its software only running largely on its own hardware, it requires a tremendous amount of trust on my part to use Apple. Trust that they won’t screw me over.
But at this point the pot has boiled over. At least Android allows me to mitigate the damage by switching over to a different phone manufacturer altogether (if not changing the software experience on my existing phone dramatically).
Being in the Apple ecosystem leaves one with no such escape hatch.
Right now besides the M and A series of processors it’s hard to tell if there’s anything in the Apple stable that is genuinely superior for my actual life.
Something as simple as the Android ability to pin live scores for games on your screen across apps makes a much greater positive difference to my life than anything iOS 26 appears to have (other than maybe better spam call screening…something Androidnhas had for years).
Agreed. I'll likely stay on iOS 18 as long as it is reliable and useful on my current iPhone, then I'll be switching to something running android with a physical keyboard. I'm pretty deep in the Apple ecosystem, but these updates have made it clear no one at Apple has a plan for the software.
So many Apple ecosystem details are half-baked and make no sense these days. For years, tags show up in some places but not others. iCloud for the web supports a completely different subset of features for things like Notes, a HUGE bummer if you want to access your Notes in a browser.
1) I am a dumbass, not a trillion dollar or whatever design company
2) I never managed to come up with something as stupid looking as that mailbox screenshot
The Mac update has made for some distasteful and inconsistent changes to window corner radius that I strongly dislike.
The problem, of course, is 1) apps and 2) things like hardware support and battery life.
Thankfully most of the "liquid glassy" things can be undone in the accessibility options on iOS.
Apparently the author (and most commenters here!) do not realize "cracked" is VERY popular gen z slang for being very good at something.
- "they cooked [hard]" is positive
- "they're [hard] cooked" is negative.
- "let them cook" means let them work, they'll do something positive.
- "someone cooked here" [0] has become a TikTok meme for positive things
One tap by holding the 3 dots and dragging finger to the “new tab” item.
But I didn’t like “compact” so switched to “bottom” layout for Tabs from Settings > Apps > Safari.
You do have to discover that faster way to do it, and the alternative is three taps.
And a follow up question: did anyone test whether reducing liquid glass effects improves battery life?
Apple TV is a nightmare. What show is selected? Impossible to tell because it is far too subtly highlighted.
Trying to find caldav settings on an iphone. Even finding the search option in the iphone settings is counter intuitive.
Everytime I have to interact with an idevice I wish I didn't.
I was against it to begin with, but after using it for a while I think it looks much better than before.
(Most of the time, I'm the last to notice this kind of stuff)
ImBuilding a desktop app where users monitor live trades. Originally planned glassmorphic overlays because they look incredible in mockups. Scrapped it after showing a trader friend.
His reaction: "Dude, I need to read a stop-loss alert through this? While watching a $5k position move against me? Make it BORING."
So I did. Solid backgrounds. No animations on critical buttons. Navigation that never moves. Zero transparency effects.
The problem: It photographs terribly. Product Hunt launch will look dated compared to Liquid Glass competitors.
But here's what I'm wondering:
Is Apple's Liquid Glass actually a gift to indie devs?
Hear me out:
Big Tech optimizes for launch day virality (they can afford the retention hit)
Indie devs MUST optimize for retention (we can't afford user acquisition costs)
If users get trained to expect "pretty but frustrating" from Apple...
...suddenly "boring but predictable" becomes our competitive advantage?
My hypothesis: In 6 months, "Works like iOS 25" will be a feature, not a bug.
What would you do?
FWIW, these days, I would gladly pay extra for that.
I am one of the people who didn't mind the Windows Vista/8.1/10/11 redesigns and to me most versions of macOS and also various Linux DEs all typically look more or less fine (maybe tiny window controls in some versions of Linux Mint are a pet peeve of mine). But this is just so much worse. That's like a Windows 8 release level fuckup.
On the phone, sure, whatever -- but on a work machine?! It's infuriating.
For example, I'm in safari and push the bookmark button and it and the neighboring buttons light up. But my finger is blocking the button I'm pressing so I don't know it's the brightest button. Instead I see the neighboring buttons light up and my brain thinks I'm pressing that.
It's been a few weeks now and you'd think I'd be over it by now but I'm not. I press the screen, a button I don't want lights up, oh no wrong button, oh wait never mind.
This scicophantic obsession with constantly redesigning the look of everything because the old design has been in use for over a year (gasp) is really starting to grate on me. Just give me the ability to skin my apps, and let me skin them however I want.
It’s actually rather funny because this cycle happens every time something does a major interface change. The comments are basically identical too.
Everybody with at least one eye can see that but good luck getting Apple to admit it. The divide here between the corporate bullshit and reality has reached kafkaesque dimensions. There should be a prize for anti-achievements like this.
Holy shit, why?!
Clicking the too of the screen always would bring you back to the top and then search was right there! This is what we get when people cater to the lowest denominator and try holding the hands of people I don't want to be lumped in with.
--
As an app developer I (generally) like liquid glass, it injects some much needed fun and freshness into our devices. It's still rough around the edges and some of these points are very valid, especially around not overdoing it to show off and some text-on-text issues.
However I do think some of the issues raised are based on a different goals around legibility.
I think NNgroup wants all interfaces to be optimally legible at any given moment. I think Apple wants all interfaces to have access to legibility at any given moment, typically by moving the screen a bit.
These are legitimate differences of opinion. A physical metaphor might be that you have a paper with a glass paperweight atop it. If one were to judge a photo of your perspective looking at it as though it were a UI, they might comment that the paper is hard to read in places because of the paperweight.
But in reality, it takes half a second to move that paperweight aside to read the paper, and the paperweight serves another valuable purpose keeping the paper from moving. This is akin to other purposes UI elements serve. It's a balance and a tradeoff.
Just like Steve Jobs pointed out to Round Rects Are Everywhere! [0], the physical world is full of content that obscures other content. What do we do? We turn our head a bit, or move a thing aside. We don't expect the physical world to have optimal legibility at all possible perspectives. While we can (and should) do better in the digital realm, there is a spectrum and the optimal point may not be where NNgroup wants it, especially as the capability of mobile devices reaches and exceeds that of the physical realm.
To address another point this article makes about touch targets:
Prior iOS versions made decisions about spacing between icons that were based on smaller devices (4.7-5.5", or 9.5-13 sq in). iPhones are larger these days (6.1-6.9", or 14-18 sq in), so the physical area of a touch target isn't actually that different, if at all. A big UI refresh is the time to update these kinds of assumptions.
[0] https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html
1. Footers in safari routinely render in the middle of the screen.
2. iPad mini simply is not the right platform for the new "windowable" functionality, but you can opt out, so there's no harm aside from maybe eating up some storage space.
Aside from that, I don't see the usability problems people are frustrated about. Maybe I'm still young enough to "get it." I think Liquid Glass is great. It feels like a return to Aqua (early Mac OS X), which was always my favorite. I for one welcome a "UI you want to lick" after years of this ridiculous spartan minimalism that started with iOS 7 and ate everything Apple.
Liquid Glass has a few bugs to iron out but as a whole is quite good.
It's a senior editor's opinion on the UI of iOS 26.
Don't care what some ulta-rationale pixelpushers are trying to tell me. There is nothing in my day-to-day interactions with the phone that got degraded, but many things are more fun now.
