2025 feels like a cardinal year for top-down decisions we all just have to endure for the present. The best we can do is bitch loudly and often, and hope the people at the top still feel threatened by consumers/constituents.
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.
I don't have accessibility issues, but even so I've been a fan of these settings for a few iOS versions now:
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
Seems like I'm against the trend here in HN, but I personally like it more the more I use it. (Admittedly I don't have any accessibility issues which may come up for others)
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.
Literally every change made in iOS 26 feels like a downgrade to me. This is the first time I have ever considered downgrading iOS.
I haven't upgraded to iOS 26 because of Liquid Glass, mostly because I've read that it causes performance degradation on older devices (I use an iPhone 13 Mini because I have zero interest in using a larger phone). So, it looks like I'll be using iOS 18 for the foreseeable future.
This style of simulating faux-realistic materials (such as glass or aluminum) on the screen looks dated and cheesy now -- (Windows engineering team 2012)
https://web.archive.org/web/20120614042824/http://blogs.msdn...
--
"Cheesy and dated" -- it keeps hitting me through the years.
All of this is true. The first thing I did was turn down transparency. But there's no way to tone down the new animations, which make the UI feel twitchy and distracting.
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.
I'm an iOS developer and for the last decade and a half I've been updating most of my Apple devices to the new version of iOS on day 1. I knew it meant bugs, but the excitement of trying shiny new features has greatly overshadowed the potential issues. iOS/macOS 26 have become the first exception for this rule.
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.
I like Liquid Glass on the whole (I will state upfront I have no accessibility issues so I know I'm speaking from my little corner).
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've always had an Android phone, but since my parents have Apple devices, I'm the one who has to help them with any technical issues.
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.
This article doesn't even mention the worst part of the update. Frame rate has dropped remarkably. iOS used to have flawless smooth animations, with 0 dropped frames, setting the industry standard. Now every interaction with the phone yanks at least once, it feels like some cheap entry level Android phone from 2008. I don't even mind the translucency, i just want my FPS back.
Some of the Safari screenshots are making me wonder if fake browser chrome attacks will become more prominent in iOS. The chrome/content boundary has slipped away to almost nothing, and it should be possible now to emulate the floating buttons on Safari.
Liquid Glass looks and feels like early 2000’s WinAmp Skin Generator skins.
What gets me about it is that it is just a lot of random vandalism of the UI without really looking like anything. The clock on my phone looks like it had anti-anti aliasing applied to it. Most of the contrast got drained out of the settings button but only the settings button. It doesn’t look like they had a vision for what it should look like but instead they just let some random check some random stuff into their source control.
iOS/macos 26 have me feeling isolated in a way I’ve never experienced in tech.
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.
My primary gripe with operating systems and computing hardware (besides functionality issues) is usually that form is failing to follow function.
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).
All these threads about iOS 26 reminded me about something long forgotten like... the release of iOS
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 of it (like hiding the Safari tab button in a menu) feels like Windows-11-stupid.
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...
I know im in the minority but I have a car (Mazda) that has CarPlay but no touch screen, so you have to scroll through the elements on the screen with a wheel.
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.
Thank you Apple for this update. You saved me so much money because I won’t buy another Apple product.
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.
“text on top of text” is the real money shot. Even someone completely without design taste or strong preferences (ie me) can see that that is a hilariously bad idea.
I’ll be sticking with the previous iOS / MacOS versions as long as possible.
Let’s not forget how Liquid Glass made my Apple Watch Series 10 laggy and battery-hungry due to the expensive fluid simulations. Reducing transparency in accessibility settings didn’t help unfortunately.
I have reduced transparency turned on in iPadOS accessibility forever. However there is so much gratuitous transparency now I can barely use half the features. Why do I need to see behind quick settings to adjust brightness? Or do anything? This new update has made me miserable. It never even asked me if I wanted to upgrade. Which I would never want anyway. I only use one, exactly one app... Foreflight.
As I read through the complaints, I'll note that two of my (younger) colleagues love it (mostly). I haven't updated yet, but when I made some observations about what I was seeing, it was defended as "making all the products the same".
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.
If it makes Apple users feel better about Liquid Glass, the Material 3 Expressive in Android 16 is an overall worse experence than what came before. Yes it looks better, but apps are much laggier, at least on my Pixel 7 anyway. The venreble 120 Hz refresh rate on Android doesn't help when scrolling HN is enough for an FPS drop.
Poor article.
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.
If they had just increased the blur and made it contrast more.
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.
There's a picture floating around out there of the Apple design team putting actual physical pieces of glass over icons that they printed out. What's funny (not really) is how much more readable that paper would have been if they simply removed the glass.
One aspect I rarely see discussed is the usability of FaceTime controls. For me, the most-used button is the switch camera button, which lets me switch between the front and back cameras. Then, I use the zoom button when I’m on the back camera. This is true even for my mom, whom I frequently call. These two buttons are hidden within the preview of your own face. Every time I want to show my dog to her or if she wants to show me something, I have to tap my face and then tap the tiny button to switch the camera. Now, with iOS 26, zooming is even harder because you have to step through each zoom level to return to 1x.
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!
I think there were some nice improvements like changing the cursor in iPadOS to be an arrow instead of a circle. I’m really just shocked at the number of serious bugs in the updates. My Apple Watch is sometimes 7 minutes faster than the actual time. MacOS is the worst though. I don’t remember the last time I experienced a kernel panic, but today my Mac crashed because of a DMA translation fault.
Remember Aero, in Windows 7? Same translucency concept. Somewhat similar animation. But without the small-screen reuse of space, with text on top of buttons, buttons on top of text and text on top of text.
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.
I might be the only one who actually really likes the Liquid Glass?
Its made my 12 pro max noticeably laggier though, which I'm definitely not a fan of..
The board should have stepped in and fire whoever signed off on it, the designers who have advocated this (because they have no taste thus not fit). I feel like Apple is running on the momentum of Steve Jobs.(The hardware is good though). I cannot realistically expect them to go McMaster Carr but at least rollback these distracting light pollution
I like it, but regardless of one's aesthetic opinions I think an important thing people are missing is the move towards UI elements being overlays on top of content instead of sandwiching or interleaving with content. This is very apparent on some apps like iOS Safari, Maps, etc. The general idea is your app content is a full screen/window canvas and your UI sits on top of it, which allows it to get out of the way of the content. I actually really like this move. The transparency serves a purpose here, it helps retain that full size appearance even when UI elements are visible. The glass effects essentially serve as a way to generate some contrast while still making the underlying content visible. Even with large UI elements on screen like sidebars, you still get the feeling that the content is prominent. I think this is going to influence how I build my own web ui's moving forward.
I've actually pointed out some of the issues right after that first trailer myself [1].
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...
Other than the large rounded corners and general increase in button size, and of course reduction in legibility, the main issue for me is the huge change performance and thus battery life issue. There is no excuse for Apple to ship such bad code, other than bad management and misguided priorities.
They also managed to introduce regressions into WebKit so that the visual and touch positions of fixed input elements diverge. Really makes you question what’s going on at Apple.
In summary, Apple messed up, they had nothing to present this year, so they came up with a bad design and passed it off as "revolutionary". This is the kind of thing a failing company does. I'm sad, I'm an Apple fan, but they are pulling scams for years instead of actual developments.
I already switched it off a few days ago.
Turning on "Reduce Transparency" and "Increase Contrast" under Accessibility > Display makes the phone a pleasure to use.
One thing I've never understood is why phone companies push these UI updates to existing devices.
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?
I've read so much criticism and listened to so many Apple podcast that I expected the worst. Then updated on day one and...it's fine? I know that people just hate any change but this was massively blown out of proportion.
The design is not my cup of tea but whatever, my issues are the bugs.
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've been using it since the public beta dropped. I don't get what all the fuss is about, it's fine. Some improvements, some annoyances, but overall fine. I like the newer windowing stuff on iPad.
I am so glad I am not the only one.
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.
In many of the examples the new UI doesn't actually show true liquid glass but just bad blurry recreations of the basic shapes of it or even better contrast on the icons on the iOS 26 screenshots. Some of it is clearly a matter of taste (spacing in Photos for example) and iOS 26 often has the bigger hitbox for input elements. I wouldn't want to use an iPhone right now regardless until they fixed all the inconsistencies, with the changing Safari ui elements for example.
It completely destroyed my iPad's (2020) performance which was to be expected, but I also catch myself using it and constantly thinking "Oh my god, this looks so ugly" about different UI elements. E.g. the numpad for entering your PIN looks so terrible when pressing buttons (at least on top of my wallpaper). It lights up in a weird way and is just unpleasant to look at.
The worse thing is that they managed to use even more white space in some place. In recent iOS (and macOS) it was already becoming very dumb, people got bigger displays only to show more space instead of content but they managed to make it even worse. Information density is at a very low point, this is a clear departure from what made Mac OS X feel like a powerful tool (I missed the compact inspectors so much).
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...
The article might have some points, but there is also a lot of complaining just for the sake of it.
- 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.
Several years ago Apple had become manic about products that looked impressive in the store but were unusable in the real world. Ultra-thin laptops with minutes-long battery life, butterfly keyboards, touch bar, etc.
Then Jony Ive left and it seemed like sanity was on its way back. But here we are again.
I thought people were overreacting. But this is rancid. I have an OCD reaction to rubber-banding in the UI (e.g. when a browser content area can’t keep up when resizing a simple page like HN). This has been a smooth operation since OS X 10.3? Tahoe can’t do it on my Mac Mini M1!
Hopefully Apple will change its decision on Liquid Glass not too long like that butterfly keyboard.
I guess that's one good thing about being blind, nothing's really changed much for us.
The article is pretty accurate. I’ve been using IOS 26 for a couple weeks and there is very little to recommend it. Yea, sometimes it looks cool, but many times it doesn’t, and as the article highlights, the usability seems to have gone backwards.
Somewhat surprisingly, I don't dislike the update as much as I thought I would. I do take large issue with text and buttons being on top of other elements that makes it hard to read them, and the article points out some very good examples. I also don't understand why the Music app got a fancy upgrade but the Classical app did not. The bottom player bars are completely different. It's as if they forgot about updating the Classical app.
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!
Made my phone immediately much laggier (iPhone 13 Pro) which is probably the intention
I've gotten used to it on iOS 26 at least, but, I have been using the official macOS release on my work macbook and it's _horrid_. I'm holding onto macOS 15 as long as I possibly can on my personal machine.
Personally I like Liquid Glass. HOWEVER, I do think there are serious problems with stability and bugs across all Apple products. From iCloud not synchronizing correctly, to Apple apps not authenticating properly on Windows, to weird glitches on iOS where the keyboards don’t show up sometimes, to the autofill not working well, to text selection being awkward. The quality of what they’re trying to do is just down across the board. And once you’re there, it doesn’t make sense to pay luxury prices for a restrictive walled garden.
The real issue is that you can´t disable this CRAP.
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?
Avoiding iOS 26 like the plague for exactly this reason. It feels like Apple decided they need to leverage their GPU silicon for a fancy GUI update without any concern for usability downgrades.
For the first time, I have not upgraded all my Apple devices to a new OS and now remain on 18. Let’s take something good and make it worse, seemingly just for the sake of it.
Looks like MacOS is finally having it's Windows Vista moment
Meanwhile linux people are removing buttons, window borders entirely, sometimes removing colors too, it's glorious.
Design system as any other human-built system requires to be documented and described in order to maintain integrity where the integrity will be described in clear terms via foundational principles that the rest of the system is built upon. I am surprised to see how some things in today's world fall apart despite in mere seconds despite enormous amount of prior art and experience and lessons learnt.
My least favorite animation is in Mobile Safari, when you tap the search bar and it expands and brings up the controls at the bottom. There's a sort of shiny sweep transition from top to bottom, but it's distracting and it's not obvious why it exists. I assume it's to highlight the bottom control bar, but that's just a guess.
I also notice that CarPlay has more contrast now, and not much Liquid Glass. Kinda telling.
It's been almost 25 years since Mac OS X launched, when Tog (Apple's first Interaction Designer and only Human Interface Evangelist), lamented that "it makes for a great demo, but not a great product."
I’m using a very stable iPhone 11, and was very content. I upgraded to iOS 18.7.1, anfter checking online feedback, then I started having a Carplay issue when on phone calls. Support suggested updating to iOS 26, and boy was that a mistake: glitchy, latency, and UI annoyances. Where is the DeLorean!
“in the Music app, the current song title ticks along like a stock-market ticker”
This is how it worked on OG iTunes. (Did it also scroll on the iPod?)
I disagree I love the glass.
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.
In general it's not as bad as people say. I like the playful aspect of it and sometimes I just scroll around to see the beautiful glass effects. The two things I don't like about it and hope are improved:
- 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
Liquid Glass is a perfect example when designers take over and there is no one left to stop them.
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.
One of the other (not transparency related) things i hate in the iOS 26 redesign is how difficult it has become to switch Safari profiles...
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.
While I do find the new iOS a little more awkward to use than the previous version I haven't given up hope on the concept yet. It's a big change and I can see v2 making some big improvements. Whether it'll be worth it in the long run I'm not sure but I can't be too upset about them trying something new.
People saying it looks dated: that's just because you're old. You remember it from the first time around. Gen Z has a lot of love for "vintage" y2k aero aesthetics and liquid glass lets Apple make a nod to that while not going full kitsch and keeping one foot in the future.
After 16 years of using exclusively iPhones, barring a few months with Windows Phone 7 and 1 week with a Samsung phone a decade ago, I’m almost certainly moving over to Android with my next phone purchase.
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).
The mental effort expended when using the newly glassy ui is most noticeable when you use the glass one on phone and then use the old one on another phone. The old UI instantly feels effortless and almost as though it was the update. I'm not upgrading my new phone. Good riddance.
Liquid ass.
Sometimes it looks really cool and I find myself playing with the UI just to see what happens, sometimes it looks so ugly and terribly antithetical to the idea of a cohesive design that I miss the previous design language significantly. The phone is a tool I use.
Sometimes I would do things like put a video underneath my terminal, using transparency so I could watch a movie while coding. However,
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
I disabled transparency because I find it objectively harder to see the icons. This is a no brainer. What used to be a clear icon is now mixed with pixels from the background, which are also potentially changing due to animations. I really don't get it.
Low contrast text over busy backgrounds, from the same asshole coke head designers who brought you the mouse you can't use while it's charging, because their whimsically creative design portfolios are more important than your time and usability.
> In iOS 26, controls insist on animating themselves, whether or not the user benefits. Carousel dots quietly morph into the word Search after a few seconds.
This has been the case for several years now (started in iOS 16 IIRC); it is not new in 26.
I like the new ui update a lot, but more so on the iPhone. I don’t like anything about the iPad so nothing lost or gained there.
The Mac update has made for some distasteful and inconsistent changes to window corner radius that I strongly dislike.
If anyone here from apple is reading, does the leadership even aware of this problem?
I can live with the different visual style but iOS 26 has cost about 30% of my battery even running all day on low power mode on an iPhone 14. It’s horrendous. Hard to even get through one day on a charge now.
I appear to be in the minority here, but I really like Liquid Glass on iPhone, Apple Watch, and especially Apple TV. But I do hate it on the Mac, the window borders are so thick and rounded, I really can’t stand it.
We live in a timeline where Apple reinvented Windows Vista's Aero and thought it was innovative. Next they will bring in spinning cube 3d desktop switching effects like the gnome 2 days of yesterdecade
You can almost hear the meeting that spawned this. "We want the interface to get out of the user's way!" macOS 26 is even worse. Suddenly not feeling so smug when I see the Windows complaints.
My wife, wo is just an average user, likes liquid glass a lot. She said it just looks nice and she did not have any usability issues. It seems us tech people are more critical towards the new UI changes
I had an old Galaxy Tab S7 collecting dust on the shelf. Since iOS 26 came out I find myself reaching for the Android tablet more and more. First time that ever happened. (Sent from my Galaxy Tab)
Feels like liquid glass is some weird preamble to augmented reality so that you get used to the interface.
Thankfully most of the "liquid glassy" things can be undone in the accessibility options on iOS.
The article makes an interesting point about the search focus. I wonder if there were plans for AI assisted search? That is a direction that could explain why search became so prominent.
I feel like they did it on purpose to set the stage for Apple Vision to not seem as hard to look at and then they’ll dial it back a bit, but maybe that’s giving them too much credit.
I wrote about this not long ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45509922
Cracked as in good or bad
It feels as if it was created for ticking some checkboxes. Not sure what is the motive here. Having said that, personally it has not created any major issues for me though.
whoever made opening a new tab in safari take three taps, the last of which is in the bottom left of the screen instead of the bottom right, has some explaining to do
It’s also introduced a bunch of UI-related bugs, like how guided access has become completely botched and destroyed to the point of almost being non-functional.
There's some parts where I'm like that looks nice, but good grief theirs so many bugs. I know they'll be fixed, but how was this ever approved?
Just add toggle button in the display settings to turn on / off Liquid Glass and there will be no problem. With good architecture this is doable.
My (certainly biased, long term apple user) opinion is that Liquid Glass is delightful. I upgraded as soon as I could, and it's honestly a joy to use
Wow, I'm NOT upgrading to iOS 26, this looks terrible. Moreover, I see people complaining about poor performance and worsening battery life.
How much of this can be turned off or otherwise reduced?
And a follow up question: did anyone test whether reducing liquid glass effects improves battery life?
Are there any settings to improve the ui? I enabled reduced motion turned but iOS 26 is still intolerable.
I remember adding translucent effects to my KDB desktop environment installation in 2008 and coming to the same conclusion
Right from the get go, I noticed the animation delays in Safari.
(Most of the time, I'm the last to notice this kind of stuff)
My wife for who an update would pass without comment normally told me she hated it yesterday when iOS updated
Apple has been a usability nightmare for years. But these are the emperor's new clothes and Swift's latest albums and people refuse to see it.
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 really hope they undo these changes. Hate it and there's no easy way to switch back to iOS 18.
iOS 26 is really bad. The only update I can remember disliking was iOS 7, but 26 is certainly worse.
Some been saying its liquid ass
I honestly disagree with the general opinion on the liquid glass, I really like it. It looks pretty, I like the refraction effect and text hasn't really been unreadable for me at all. Yes, there is 'text behind text' but foreground text is clear and readable, whilst the background text would've been invisible if the background were solid or blurred rather than glassy, so it doesn't matter if the background text is readable.
I was against it to begin with, but after using it for a while I think it looks much better than before.
After reading NN/g's iOS 26 critique, I'm sitting here staring at my trading app's deliberately boring UI and feeling... vindicated?
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?
These are otherwise smart people who also make more money than I ever will, shipping stuff that is bad even when it comes to basic usability, like the transparency in particular. I don't get it, why did something like that pass through whatever approval processes are in place? If nothing else, they should have at least ensured that there is enough opacity and contrast with whatever's the background at any given time, otherwise it's just... way, way worse than the previous design?
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.
I definitely agree. Something about it just seems off.
I love everything about the new design
The worst part of it is they'll dig in their heels and absolutely refuse to admit to their mistakes -- doubling down on this UX downgrade for years to come.
On the phone, sure, whatever -- but on a work machine?! It's infuriating.
So far the most I've seen is that it's a bit annoying and not set up for working with fingers.
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.
Liquid Glass totally, completely, utterly sucks. It's horrible. Time for Tim Cook to go. He can and should remain on the board, but geez wiz is this bad.
OS 26 (Both i and Mac variants) are prime examples of designers trying desperately to justify their ongoing jobs by redesigning everything for the sake of a redesign.
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.
Sounds like it's the first time you know AAPL. You won't get disappointed if lower your expectations of products from such a company. I am using iPhone SE as a digital wallet / dumb phone, the new UI doesn't make it worse because it's already buggy and nonresponsive. Newer devices on your hands will perform as bad after three years.
Meh. People are gonna complain about it for a while and then forget all about it. And then 5 or 10 years from now you’ll see some movie or tv show with the older design and you’ll be able to instantly date the show.
It’s actually rather funny because this cycle happens every time something does a major interface change. The comments are basically identical too.
> Now, in iOS 26, search has migrated to the bottom of the screen and is always visible.
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.
TLDR not all perspectives have optimal legibility, but if it's easy to change perspective to achieve optimal legibility, then it might be a good tradeoff if you get other value in return. And phones have gotten bigger, and this is a reset of default device expectation.
--
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
Am I the only one who feels like this doesn’t even look good, even if it was a better user experience?
> and Usability Suffers in iOS 26
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.
I think that HackerNews is full of old techie greybeards, whereas Liquid Glass is designed for Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Young people tend to like things that wiggle and bounce around and so on. If I were Apple then I'd say hmm, we still want to be around 20 years from now. So let's design for young people.
In short: Dear Apple, please tone it down a few notches.
Honestly, this article is overblown. It works just fine for me and I don't have any major issues.
Unpopular opinion apparently: I love it. I’ve been using it since beta 1 and it’s grown on me enormously. iOS 18 on my work iPhone felt incredibly dated and I was relieved when we could finally upgrade enterprise devices.
My honest take, there are only two problems with iOS 26:
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.
iOS 7 “UIApocalypse” all over again.
Liquid Glass has a few bugs to iron out but as a whole is quite good.
IOS 26 is fucked! Please offer a fix to go back to IOS 18+ Don’t like it and can’t get rid of it. Thank you so much Apple.
Liquid Glass is complete and utter trash. I pray Apple gets a clue and gives us a new better UI even if it’s just the old one.
liquid glass is dumb. i've no idea what's going on at apple, but it makes zero sense.
damn I sure do hope all my iThings keep working until Apple's stepped back from this liquid glass nonsense, I do not want to be forced onto it because I had to get a new phone/tablet/computer.
Yeah, it sucks. Roll it back, Apple. Roll it back.
It’s annoying
As someone who pretty strictly adheres to Apple Human Interface Guidelines, it's really off-putting to see them slip so badly backwards on their own published work.
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.
To clarify, this isn't based on user research or survey results, as other Nielsen Group writeups are.
It's a senior editor's opinion on the UI of iOS 26.
I love the update. OS looks super nice and fresh. I love playing around with it and interacting with the glassy elements.
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.
This update is one of the rare cases where I really dislike the new version. I’m usually happy with Apple updates, even ones the commentators dislike. This time I’m sorta agreeing with them: I don’t like the new iOS. Same with the Mac and iPad: other than being glitchy, I just don’t like the changes. It feels like my screen real estate isn’t as efficiently used, UI elements feel jumbled and the transparency makes things harder to read. I’m sure I’ll get used to it over time but I’m not enjoying it so far, even after going into the settings to try to adjust things I don’t care for. Not my favorite update cycle from Apple, and I’m usually one of the overly positive folks on whatever Apple ships.