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Serious question, anyone have guesses on how such an awful set of UI changes could have gotten approved? Even amongst my non-tech friends, they all agree that based on screenshots, things are harder to read. The latest iOS 26 beta even makes the glass effect more opaque which to me is an admission they screwed up, but they also certainly can’t completely backtrack at this point.

Apple has consistently balanced beauty and function, from their hardware to stores to product packaging. They must have an army of experienced UX designers and well thought out user testing processes. Given all that, how in the world did this liquid glass idea even get past the preliminary mockup stage? Were/are they simply betting that the cool factor of the glass effect will outweigh the usability issues? And that Windows Vista’s glass UI went out of style simply because it wasn’t realistic enough?

This beautifully summed up a lot of what I've been thinking about Liquid Glass since I first saw it. A lot of it doesn't really make sense - in an effort to make usability clearer, they are designing everything to look the same and create more empty space for... vibes?

As the years have gone on, it feels like computers are slowly losing every ounce of personality they once had. Software should be delightful to use! Computers felt fun! I'm hoping we eventually get through this minimal/bland era of UI design and come back around to design with a little creativity.

It feels like Apple is trying to subtly introduce the concept of spatial UI for the future, where the norm will be to have controls and content on separate "layers" - but I don't think it should come at a cost of sacrificing the interfaces we already have.

I liked Liquid Glass when I first saw it. I don't especially like the whole flat look everyone has had going the past few years so I was really looking forward to a refresh.

I downloaded the beta and the more I use it the less I like it. The icons are blurry, washed out and look terrible overall. I have a difficult time using the buttons on the lock screen to activate the flashlight and camera. Most of the time, I push them and the lock screen customization screen comes up instead of the flashlight turning on. I don't know if they changed the geometry of the buttons or what, but I can't reliably use them anymore. There are other instances of low contrast text, weird blurry artifacts and janky animations.

I hope these are all things that get worked out during the beta period. Overall, the whole thing looks unimpressive so far. I keep telling myself that OSX had the same kind of jank during the first beta and it will all work out. I want to roll back to iOS 18, but I can't do that without using iTunes, which isn't possible because I only have Linux machines.

How many have used the new iOS daily since it was announced?

Gentle reminder that the average Mac user is nontechnical, especially the younger generation. IMO this is Apple slapping a formalized paint on the simplification of iOS 7, and doubling down on iconography (not app icons).

Now all of that said — there are major usability concerns in iOS 26 and the liquid glass design language. The file picker’s previous “Done” has been replaced with a single checkmark. Significant meaning is lost in a few places, and there are super-odd double-X icons (in mobile safari while entering a URL, for example). Safari’s new tab button is now out of reach, while the previous new tab gesture is now new tab group. Context menus expand now, instead of swipe, meaning what used to feel more natural now takes extra taps/muscle memory updates.

That all said, as iOS 7 improved over time and was nailed down, so will this.

To me it’s given the iPhone - an incredibly boring platform/device 18 years in - new life. The new Lock Screen Photo Shuffle is incredibly personable and downright beautiful. From my understanding, a lot of work went into pre-composing app icons, many of which are objectively beautiful.

I’ve found users can’t find buttons “under the thumb” so I’m curious how the dedicated tab bar search will work in practice.

Overall I think for the goals of liquid glass as a design system, it’s something only Apple could do - in a good way.

> Why would you want to “focus on the underlying content” here? Tab bars and toolbars still cover the underlying content, and the more transparent/translucent they are, the worse. When something fades to the background, it literally ceases to be in the foreground, so there’s no point in focusing on it. This is like proposing an interface that helps you focus your sight on your peripheral vision.

I believe that's exactly what Apple wants. This new design direction appears to be a strategy to unify all UI for VR as well.

If all controls are designed to be translucent, they (Apple) have freedom to put the control anywhere on the user's field of view on VR and allow "focus on the underlying content" (which in the case of VR, is the real world).

Time will tell if this approach makes sense for 2D screens.

> while you won’t actually be able to see the part of the image under the sidebar, on the other hand the transparency effect applied to the sidebar will make the text on it less legible overall. A great lose-lose situation, visually, don’t you think?

Yes, of course, but it looks bold and innovative and designers can waste years tweaking various details across many apps!

> reduces the amount of information displayed on screen, and you’ll have to scroll more as a consequence. ... You’re just injecting white space everywhere.

Sure, but that's a common scourge in all modern design, why would an innovative design company stay behind?

The rounding on the corners bothers me more than anything else. It just doesn't look good on a mobile screen. There's already minimal space to play with, why make the target zone for a button even smaller? It adds to visual noise as well.

Meanwhile the VLC icon sidesteps all of it by making zero symbolic sense but never changing.

The main issue that I have with Liquid Glass, is that it changes a bunch of dimensions and behaviors.

If you are writing all your apps in SwiftUI, then that's probably OK. However, the vast majority of apps use UIKit (or use a library that is ultimately based on UIKit), with AutoLayout. In fact, I'll bet that most of the really big apps are still ObjC/NonAutoLayout.

AutoLayout/UIKit is a big fat pain in the ass, but it works extremely well. It has had over a decade, to buff out the rough spots and corner cases. I can't think of a single UI conundrum that I've had, in the last ten years, that I couldn't figure out how to address with AL. With SwiftUI, I'm constantly running into "You can't get there, from here."

Most (probably all, but I have a couple of old ones) of my apps work well in any display. That means resized (usually narrow vertical) iPad windows, rotated iPhones (where a lot of the UI scrolls off the bottom, and you need to scroll for it), and resized Mac windows.

With SwiftUI, you tend to get support for that pretty much automatically, but with AL, you usually need to specifically design for it, so when the phone gets rotated, things flow into the right places, etc.

Adding all the LG borders around things like tab bar items and navbar items, changes the layout; sometimes, fairly substantially.

Right now, I'm just tossing a UIDesignRequiresCompatibility into the Info.plist, but that feels like a kludge, and I'll need to adapt, but that may take a while.

Excellent summary of critiques.

Not mentioned is the peculiar response by the Apple ecosystem pundits. They were oddly supportive of these maladaptive design system changes on the basis of excitement (they can’t afford to be left out of the media momentum…). I believe their collusive tendencies mask what would otherwise be perceived as a major flop or severe error.

Also not mentioned in the piece, I remain curious as to the internal Apple team/culture changes that resulted in this design system failure. What on earth happened?

> But it’s not just that, it’s that these ‘Icon Appearances’ also remove colour, depth, and personality from third-party app icons too. This further dictates (and interferes with) what kind of design a third-party developer may choose for their apps. All this after recommending employing “a minimal number of shapes” and “prefer[ring] a simple background”.

This is something Apple has been consistently great at. I do not want a 3rd Party App to look and feel massively different from a first party app. In fact I'd like all apps to look and feel very uniform. Whenever some third rate designer thinks their design is somehow better than the entire rest of the systems design you get ugly mismatches and clashing styles. Even if the 3rd Party Design IS superior, it won't look any good being completely out of place.

About the icons: Original book looked best: we have lots of pixels, why not use them? The icon has a non-standard shape, making it easy to spot. Or if you actually need to have icon-shaped outlines, top-right one is beautiful, too. Although the shading should perhaps be removed if some OSs have their own shade logic for the whole images.

I have a feeling this will be yet another case of the nerds thinking something is a huge deal and when people update their phones this fall I bet most people won't care after 10 minutes.

I have only been able to play with iOS 26 so far a little bit in the simulator, and so far it seems fine. To me it feels like after a couple months I will likely forget that a change was made (which TBH I think is a good thing, unlike when Windows has tried to make a change and never completes...).

However there is one thing that I wanted to comment on here:

> I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple. The guidelines and rules are meant to sublimate the brands of the third party, and replace it with Apple.

Personally one of the things that drives me insane is when an app tries to be special and have its own design language (looking at you Google) on my iOS device. The OS has an established design language and really should be used for most applications.

I understand wanting to have a brand identity but too many apps take this too far that just lead to a clunky experience.

First option I will be enabling immediately is "Reduce Transparency"

This is likely going to look really cool and feel even better on iOS and iPadOS. The phones haven't changed visually (hardware or software) a ton in a decade because, frankly, they are a really mature and solid product. There's a reason not many iPhone 15 users upgraded to 16. With Liquid Glass, for once in a long while iPhone users will look down and instantly see drastic change. Remember iOS 7? That took a long time to iron out all the "oof!" as well. But it slowly did improve.

On MacOS, though, I really do worry it's going to take several iterations before things make a lot of sense. God forbid this new UI layer hurts performance, too, on these exceptionally fast machines.

Good news is things are still in beta. Some ideas can always be walked back.

it’s crazy. it seems like someone came up with this new design because they liked the transparency effect and only afterwards they came up with the arguments and reasoning about it. worse, if they would have the balls to say “we changed it because we believe it looks nicer and this is where we want to move with our uis” i would at least respect them because of it. but they cannot say something like this (prob because it’s not investor friendly), so they have to come up with these clearly conflicting reasons

Commenters seem confident that Liquid Glass is basically a VR thing. But I thought the Metaverse bombed, Apple Ski Googles (correct name?) bombed. Why would Apple go all-in on VR when it's looking more and more like VR is not coming for a while, if ever?

It's time we acknowledge that the purpose of most UI "progress" or "change" is sales.

An entity like Apple introduces UI "enhancement" to attract prospective users and persuade existing users that the functionality of the product is new, efficient, or otherwise "good."

UI is generally fashion and trend that seeks the "new" at great cost.

This is why there is a lack of internal consistency or rigor with respect to some UI direction: consistency, functionality, etc. are not the point.

I’m not a professional designer, but I like Liquid Glass. If you don’t like it, stay on iOS 18 or switch to Android.

Aside from the criticism of icons, every complaint in the article just came across as nit-picks.

> I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple. The guidelines and rules are meant to sublimate the brands of the third party, and replace it with Apple.

I have the same impression. Frankly I believe the whole purpose of "Liquid Glass" is to create an exaggerated version of the GUI Apple intends to use later-on in AR glasses, which is then toned back again in later releases to match the feasible implementation on the glasses.

The expected migration curve seems to be to force all applications now to become more bland and less distinguishable from the OS (and Apple services), so that at the end of the journey (in a future AR-product) Apple can #1 render those apps consistently without disrupting their UX and #2 present itself as the user-facing service provider for all the value created by those apps (with the app-developer being responsible for the integration and UX-compliance).

It's a dream-scenario. Need a ride-hailing service? Let "the Apple glasses" do it for you. Under the hood the apps are then hopefully so streamlined already that service-providers will compete to be the fulfilment entity for this task.

Almost hilarous:

> Apple Design-Guide: "Ensure that you clearly separate your content from navigation elements [..]"

Honest auto-complete:

"[..] the OS will then use the GPU to draw all attention away from the content to the navigation elements"

Same sht over and over again.

Apple keeps good or great things as their are: Apple is loosing its edge look how other are so innovative.

Apple takes some risk and go bold on things: Why changing things?

At the end everyone else complaining would just follow and copy.

Rinse and repeat, bring the eyeballs and the money to my btching site or profile.

I can’t help but read Apple’s guidelines and think they read something from the 90s or early 2000s and completely misinterpreted it. Quoting (and this theme is repeated over and over):

> Ensure that you clearly separate your content from navigation elements, like tab bars and sidebars, to establish a distinct functional layer above the content layer.

This makes perfect sense. Separate content and controls. In this variant, controls go on top, like a toolbar, and then there’s a horizontal division (maybe an actual line, maybe just blank space), then content.

Then I looked at the pictures again and did a double take. Apple doesn’t have a clear separation at all. And the controls are at the bottom, not the top.

The punchline, of course, is that Apple transposed the Y and Z axes! The functional layer isn’t toward the top of the screen — it’s toward the user! You are supposed to separate content and controls along X or Y so that content is next to controls but separated a bit but, for some reason, Apple is floating controls over content, in the Z axis. The separation is a plane, parallel to the screen, that you can’t see because the controls are in the way.

Apple, turn off your fancy shaders and go back to the drawing board. You have so many more pixels than any 90s designer, and yet you can fit almost no unobscured content on the screen. And your poor users can’t see the divisions between content and everything else because you built the technology to rotate the whole UI 90 degrees about the X axis!

More like "liquid ass", please forgive the pun.

The core issue is that Apple et al all have their UX/UI in-house, which means on the payroll, which means they have to produce something new to justify their continued employment. But instead of devs who always have some bugs to fix or some old cruft to refactor, these opportunities are rare for UX/UI, mostly because you'd also need to employ proper support teams that have a way of aggregating customer complaints or improvement ideas (and legal FUD surrounding the question of "copyright on suggestions" - LWT famously bans their employees from even reading r/LastWeekTonight to avoid getting held liable if they use an idea someone suggested there) and to derive improvement ideas from there.

It's either "boom (every 3-4 years) or bust".

> I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple

I got my first taste of computers on early 90's Macs and was enchanted. Within a year I discovered DOS, Windows - and freedom. I did tech support for both Mac and Windows computers for several years. It's always been abundantly clear that the Empire of Mac exists for its own glorification (and obscene profits) - customers, developers, partners - they are all in service of Apple. It's unfortunate that Apple does some things with unparalleled quality and maintains a loyal following, because the apple has always been rotten at its core.