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.
Beyond that, it’s buggy and inconsistent. In dark mode, text boxes suddenly become light mode when they expand to add a second entry line. Buttons aren’t aligned within their containers properly. Some times buttons are in light mode when my phone is in dark mode, or if I open an app, it starts out in light mode and then suddenly switches to dark mode after a second or two. There is a noticeable lag when I back out of a message before it loads the other conversations in iMessage.
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.
In my opinion Liquid Glass is still an alpha release. Nothing is really finished, it's conceptually unfinished, the changes are not well thought through, and it's really buggy.
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.
The recently presented ChatGPT apps are what Apple Intelligence (and Siri) should've been. Some chat/voice interface, that can access data from installed apps and trigger actions.
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.
I still find Apple Maps to be awful. It consistently gives poor directions. For example the exit you need to take from the closest major road to reach my neighborhood splits once you are on it. If you continue straight you reach a stop light where you can then take a left and then continue 1/8th of a mile to the turn for my neighborhood. Apple Maps will instead have you go to the right when the exit splits and then have you continue another 1/2 mile before taking a u-turn and heading back the 5/8ths of a mile to turn into my neighborhood. Google Maps does the right thing. I now warn visitors to use Google Maps or to ignore these directions from Apple Maps.
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.
A 'plot'? That must be some kind of weird online conspiracy theory. Apple Maps worked poorly on initial release for reasons that are entirely unmysterious (the lack of comprehensive and accurate geographical data). Forstall was of course fired as an eventual result of this, but the idea that the whole PR disaster was engineered as part of a scheme to oust him is just daft.
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.
Yes, Apple still has the advantage over OpenAI. But OpenAI can also release some iOS and Android integration layer, that allows to connect with installed apps on the device.
If Apple doesn't get their act together with the next iOS release, it could be too late.
OpenAI can't, they're completely dependent on Apple and Google permitting such a thing. Unless you have a particular way in mind they could currently achieve this?
They can integrate into third party apps, if the publishers want to. A lot of them are going to do it.
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 doubt this will be super successful because so many of the apps that people would want to integrate it are those made by Apple, Google, Meta and others whose goal is to be a direct competitor. I might be wrong though, we'll see.
One of the issues is almost certainly that the app developers didn't add the UIDesignRequiresCompatibility = YES[0] item to the Info.plist.
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.
I’m referring entirely to built-in Apple apps - Mail, Messages, etc. The in-house apps can’t even get it right, which to me means:
- 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.
Such reclusiveness is not an obligatory property of large corporations. Say, Google around 2011-2015 may have had fiefdoms, but at least things were quite transparent, you could know what other departments are doing, and see all the code. Facebook circa 2020 was surprisingly transparent and peer-to-peer, at least in the area I touched, messaging and storage infra. I've seen companies 1000x smaller that had incomparably more reclusiveness and opaqueness.
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 bad everywhere. If I open Settings, and then search for application $X, no results. If I search for $Y, $Y shows up. They are alphabetically next to each other, and I can see them both if I open the Applications submenu and scroll down to access individual app settings.
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.
It’s so bizarre. I wanted to use it for a menu extra and something as simple as animating the icon couldn’t be done. There are several of Apple’s own apps that use animated Menu extra icons and they’re probably doing the same hybrid AppKit/SwiftUI workarounds.
I won’t use UIViewRepresentable. I feel that it’s a kludge, and kind of negates the whole purpose of SwiftUI. I know that some of the “native” types are probably UIViewRepresentable, under the covers (like maps), but I feel as if it’s a “duct tape” solution. Also, some of the code gymnastics that I need to do, in order to implement “non-standard” functionality, are pretty crazy. SwiftUI makes it absurdly easy to do stuff that follows the intended workflow, but completely falls down, if you stray off the path. UIKit complains, but grudgingly goes along with you.
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.
> One of the issues is almost certainly that the app developers didn't add the UIDesignRequiresCompatibility = YES[0] item to the Info.plist.
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.
If it were implemented as intended, it would just be very ugly, slower, and a waste of battery life. But a lot of it is really just broken. In the past hour, I saw a number of funny glitches. The funny glitches are better than the glitches where things crash or hang.
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.
This is hitting people who aren't tech-savvy particularly hard
I 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).
Just from my anecdata, I know someone whose dad stopped responding to voicemails since he was confused by the new app, and another person whose parents both using iPhone SEs (2020 / 2022 version) who also really don't like it. (They upgraded because I'm always talking about software updates- feels bad.)
I suppose an upvote should be sufficient, but I am so unhappy with the new UI I am actually holding off switching to a new M4 MBP and sticking to my old M1 still on Sequoia 15.7.1. I also try to give these things time and I am usually ok with the changes eventually, but the new UI elements are so incredibly distracting it's actually affecting my ability to focus on what I'm actually doing.
At least with Macs you are free to choose and downgrade to any OS version that you like, so long as that version supports your hardware. macOS 15.7.1 will run just fine on any M4 Mac, and Apple will likely continue to release 15.x updates for a year or so yet, and security updates even beyond that.
It's not like iOS where, once updated, you're generally blocked from ever downgrading back to a previous OS version.
I decided to postpone an iPhone upgrade for another year rather than be forced to use iOS 26 without a downgrade option. This is the only way to send a signal.
I upgraded iOS after I discovered that the AirPods Pro 3 lose native integration with iOS 18 and macOS 15. Hated it so much, I sent the AirPods Pro 3 back for discounted AirPods Pro 2 and am considering trading my upgraded iPhone in for the latest model I can get on iOS 18.
I'm going to ride iOS 18 and macOS 15 into the sunset and then leave the Apple ecosystem.
Thanks, that’s very good to know. I was actually eyeing the new AirPods, and it didn’t even occur to me that their functionality is tied to the iOS version. Now they’ve become just another thing to skip.
They still work as generic Bluetooth earphones, including ANC and transparency, but they don’t show up in FindMy and you can’t control case charging sounds or notification volume.
The M4 MBP, even if it comes pre-installed with Tahoe, can still be downgraded to Sequoia via DFU restore. The real cut-off will be the M5 Macs, which only Tahoe and above will have hardware support for.
Apart from the usual suspect of "modern" UI designers needlessly changing stuff to justify their job, it is my personal opinion that the SwiftUI framework is one of the root causes of Apple's piss-poor software UX and performance. For anything apart from very simple bog-standard views, that framework becomes bewildering with a high cognitive burden and simply does not scale well when any kind of customization is needed.
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.
IMO at Apple the feedback loops seem to have gotten longer. They took a lot of time to discontinue the butterfly keyboards, bring magsafe back, etc. So it's likely that they'll double down on this OS/ UX than correct their path soon. I am not saying that they don't care. But I haven't seen statements like 'we made a mistake', or even 'you are holding it wrong', etc. This- not caring to be answerable to the end user, along with other perceptions in this thread (like siloed teams, bugs in their own apps) makes me think that Apple has become a somewhat dysfunctional enterprise. If they are going down that path, maybe they should hire SAFe Agile consultants. :-)
Disclaimer: Don't follow Apple or HN a lot. And these opinions are maybe more of my perceptions than facts. Open to corrections.
I know it's shit. But for all of you, regardless of whether it's Mac OS or iOS, go to accessibility options and enable high contrast. It removes transparency/liquid glass.
I just bought a M4 MBA, my first since a 2014 MBP. I absolutely hated the 26 update on my phone and iPad but honestly don’t even notice it on my MacBook.
On my Mac I almost laugh at how massive the borders are to accommodate the freakishly large corner radius. The next version might have round windows at this pace.
I found that there's one upside to it: the empty space "outside" the corner still counts as part of the window, but it also works as a hot corner for drag and drop window resizing purposes.
That said, it's still comically large, and actually intrudes onto app UI in some cases, especially with scrollbars.
The only time before this I've felt like Apple took a huge UX or appearance dive on an OS upgrade was iOS6 -> iOS7. People complain about almost every macOS upgrade, but the closest they've come to bothering me is that I hated the new tab styles in desktop Safari they introduced a while ago, but that was configurable so I just set it back to normal and that was that. I've disliked other things (the Touch Bar was never anything but a way for me to accidentally open Music—I basically had to disable it to make any of those MacBooks usable) but never really been bothered by an OSX/macOS update's appearance.
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.
Heh, I submitted a complaint with Apple every day until they reverted those Safari tab styles. Awful design. There is something deeply broken inside Apple allowing these broken, awful designs get out.
I thought the strength of Apple design, historically, was the resistance to this middle-manager BS. Apple pushed out UI changes just to keep the pot boiling, so to speak, but it generally all made sense together, which suggests strong governance.
P.S. thank you for using the correct form of “effect”!
“No one wants an actual touch screen, but they definitely want a really narrow touchscreen directly above their keyboard. It’s contextual.”
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.
> No one wants an actual touch screen, but they definitely want a really narrow touchscreen directly above their keyboard. It’s contextual
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.
Just like big screens on phones weren’t ergonomic and a stylus for a tablet meant the tablet interface had failed. It’s a bad idea right until Apple does it. (Which is not to say that Apple might not do it better if/when they decide to do it.)
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.
Same boat. I started with the third public beta on my iPhone and the UX overhaul has not grown much on me. I reversed the Safari layout back to the previous, the combined Phone sections are not intuitive (and I almost reversed back to the previous with that too), the lock screen change is not bad but also not bringing more usability... The lack of new lock screen widgets is baffling. The overall appearance... it's hideous. Everything looks unfocused/muddy, colors look gross, readability is down and practically everything is clunky. I changed my Home Screen apps to all clear so I wouldn't have to look are the loud and oversaturated colors. Def not Apple's best work and confusing how we got here. The spam filtering for texts and phone calls is the prize change for the entire OS, which is funny because Apple Intelligence is still somewhat worthless even a year and a big update later. Genmoji, the only good thing about it, still fails 50%+ of the time.
The transparency thing stopped being cute when I couldn't easily differentiate between Gmail, ProtonMail, and Apple Mail. These icons had color, used that color to differentiate them.
I don't think this is atypical, we have color screens for a reason.
The glass style for iOS app icons is completely idiotic. It's optional though. It doesn't even look good, it just makes the home screen look a little less crowded, but the UX is horrible.
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.
Same here. I was about to order a new MacBook recently, but there’s been a lot of small issues annoying me over the past few years and Liquid Glass was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me.
Back to Linux for me. Ended up ordering a Thinkpad X1 Carbon instead, and am planning to throw Fedora on it.
I'd be ambivalent about it if it didn't ship broken. My Mac updated the other day and I don't think I've seen the glass top bar work correctly once. In fullscreen in particular it doesn't work at all, the background that it's meant to be blurring gets stuck and never changes, so it just looks like shit and is nearly unreadable. I'm not on any beta track or anything so this is what normal people get. I have no idea how they felt good shipping it.
I always wait for each point release and see if complaints are up or down. I can adjust to about any UI, as long as 80-90% stays the same. For example I ditched windows almost completely at 8 when they left the classic look and went for tablet mode. That's when I went to Mac, I'd been an avid linux user since the 90s though. What I can't put up with are bugs, so I wait out reviews and such from actual technical people and tech sites like reddit and hackernews. It's a policy that hasn't failed me yet.
From reading this thread I’m glad I’m not alone. It seems their “compact” mode has a bunch of invisible gestures that you’re just supposed to know about.
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.
This article gave me hope that when I finally have to upgrade my Mac to keep up with system requirements for software updates on third-party apps, maybe I won't hate it as much as I expected to. It's a mess, but the screenshots in this article give me hope that it doesn't have to be a complete and total disaster.
[0] How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface:
One thing I’ve noticed is that search fields are now generally at the bottom of the screen which makes them a lot easier to activate. (No more flicking the screen down to search).
I disliked the update for a week or so at first, but I have to say I find the liquid animations fun now.
> 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.
True, the search fields are in a better position now, but this really has nothing to do with the liquid glass paradigm. This could have been done in the previous designs just as well, I think.
It’s terrible from a UX standpoint. By definition, translucent elements present more potential information to a user. It makes it harder to parse certain screens. It’s a nightmare if you have subtle vision issues (where it’s not bad enough you’d need to enable accessibility options). You’re not going to “get used to it” — you’re really just adapting to a crippled interface.
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.
The problem is designs and elements that were carefully considered and crafted for Vision OS don't always translate well when grafted into iOS and macOS. What looks elegant and modern in AR can look garish, distracting, and old-fashioned on a more traditional device.
It honestly wouldn't bee too bad on macOS if they kept this mostly to the window chrome, or things that really need to float. But adding this to all the toolbar buttons, in Safari and Finder looks just like some 3rd party theme hack, it's really tacky. They also didn't seem to consider dark mode well or at all.
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.
And what about online tutorials, marketing, user manuals, customer support? You probably want your app to look consistent with that too, right? Do you really expect or even want to sift through multiple different versions of tutorials and guides?
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.
> As long as an app is easy to use, people prefer a single look
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!
Most people only have one mobile device, a smartphone. Those that have more than one usually still have those with matched OSes. No-one cares about "looking like the OS", but people do care about looking (and, more importantly, behaving) like all the other apps they use.
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.
If the app is Blender, or some other extremely complex software then sure. If it’s the bank app or social media, it would take me no time to understand the difference between the iOS and Android native UI.
You were wrong to even attempt to share design language across platforms. You should make your applications good native citizens if you have any respect for your users, because yours isn’t the only software they use.
That’s a pretty bold statement. Look at the most popular apps, and you will see across Android and iOS that the designs across platforms are more similar than they are different. We only have 2 engineers right now, but we still maintain clean native implementations for navigation, interactions, and areas where native UI excels. Neither our Android or iOS apps appear as if we just copy-pasted from one platform to the other. Both Android and iOS had been leaning into flat design for years, so it was easy to adapt the same design language for our brand across both. Not so with this return of skeuomorphic design.
I think this idealism reveals a naive viewpoint about what users really care about. They care that apps work - that they do what they're supposed to and do it fast or efficiently. Not even Microsoft makes apps for their own platform that are native apps (example Teams, the new Outlook), and they service millions of users. Indeed, if you look at Microsoft's UI over the years, they are inconsistent as hell (all of the Office apps throughout the years is a good example), but so long as performance, functionality and usability hasn't suffered too much, users are OK with non-native apps that do not appear native. Another example is iTunes on Windows - looks nothing like a native Windows app.
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?
On desktop that ship has sailed. Maybe 2 of my regularly used apps have a native design.
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.
It hasn't fully done so on the desktop when you consider macOS. E.g. if you ship a macOS app which has the main menu bar inside the window (or missing entirely) instead of using the system menu bar, it will look very jarring and users will rightly complain.
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.
The trend over the past decade has been towards multiplatform frameworks, mostly with React Native, but more recently Flutter, KMP, and even Swift multiplatform.
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.
Our large commercial apps were certified to pass the WCAG accessibility requirements, which we need to comply with for legal reasons. If we did’t enable the compatibility flag and opt out of the glass altogether, this would have meant massive breakages and regressions, which would require the designer and developer time to fix, and the financial burden of having to go through the certification process again. And all because of Apple’s whims and zero benefits for our customers or our developers. Why would we blindly choose to follow Apple’s missteps instead of having our own design system and standards?
I don't think that's true. First line of respect is good UI/UX, second line of respect is being fast/not being slow, third might be being coherent with the rest of the apps on that platform.
As a developer, I don't care what Apple or Google's "design language" whims are today. If someone can't figure out how to use a well designed app, no matter the "design language", a fancy skin isn't going to fix that.
> You should make your applications good native citizens
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.
If you're starting from the perspective of a native app developer, you're absolutely correct. However, most startups are going to be websites/Electron/CEF apps. It's much easier and cheaper to write-once-ship-everywhere with an ugly React UI than it is to jump through the hoops of writing special-snowflake versions for every OS under the sun.
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.
It depends who your application is for. You obviously think building an application is about maximizing your profit, and your users are just a means to achieve that. If you were approaching your application from a “what’s best for my users” angle you might make different choices.
If you are running a business with limited funding (which is most businesses), then your primary need is to seek profit in a world where profit is often never achieved at all. Otherwise, your business ceases to exist, along with your app. Sometimes that does mean emphasis on strong design, which I’d argue means delivering a great experience to your users rather than a native or non-native design choice. Other times, you’re serving a demographic that doesn’t care so much about that, and your focus is on functionality above all.
Almost nobody uses both an iPhone and Android for their day to day use. It doesn’t matter if your iOS and Android apps don’t look share the same design language, no one is going to see both of them.
And most apps that eschew the base design system while using the same kinds of GUI elements it provides, are usually terrible. Only when the app does something way out of the lane of what the OS provides does it usually work well.
> 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.
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)
Not really, the point versions have betas as well. I'm on 26.1 beta 2 on iOS.
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.
To try and make my phone less interesting so I spend less time on it, I also use Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Colour Filters > Greyscale with Intensity turned up to max so it's black and white. If you set Settings > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut to Colour Filters you can toggle this with a triple slick of the side button, in case you want to show someone a photo or something.
It’s not really a bug, it’s a side effect of the heavier blur resulting in more average colors for the backgrounds of UI controls, reducing contrast with the text and icons in the foreground. Instead of blurring whatever is behind the controls, they’d have to choose actual solid backgrounds for UI controls, but the whole Liquid Glass concept largely abandons that.
It's definitely a bug that high contrast no longer provides high contrast in the liquid glass setting. It doesn't matter if that is the logical outcome of a series of events and choices that were made to that point, it's a breaking change in behavior, therefore a bug.
Bugs aren't always NPEs. Business Logic bugs are still bugs.
There is no “high contrast”. Increase Contrast has roughly the same (limited) effects it always had (enhancing the presentation of specific UI controls in specific ways), hence it’s not broken. What I’m saying is that Reduce Transparency is reducing contrast in a way that is orthogonal to, and isn’t prevented by, also having Increase Contrast turned on.
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.
Reduce Transparency helps in some ways, but also introduces its own issues. A couple I noticed in the brief time I used it:
* 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.
I’ve recently been trying out the automations feature in the iOS shortcuts app to turn color filters off/on when opening/closing camera/photos/facetime so I can remove the triple click shortcut. It works well enough. Its disappointing but not surprising that in 2025 on an iPhone 15 pro this isn’t instant and takes a good half second for the color filters to turn off/on.
It works, but it looks even worse. Also the reduced transparency in many apps leads to a letterbox effect, which reduces the available space for content.
Can someone please make me understand why does searching for "Accessibility" in settings doesn't return any results? In fact, none of the search accessibility search terms work, like: "reduce", "transparency", "contrast", "motion".
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?
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.
I like it too. However, I have noticed several screens that clearly were never tested by any Apple testers. Not just the liquid glass part, either; I've found entirely borked screens inside of the iOS settings app.
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.
I'm newer to iOS (first iPhone was 15 pro) and macOS (M2 Air) so have tried to keep an open mind - only excessively irritating bugs will get me back to android and windows, as the back and forth transition is a soft barrier.
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.
> (Admittedly I don't have any accessibility issues which may come up for others)
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.
>It is insane to put everyone over about 50 into an accessibility category
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.
Turning on reduce transparency makes it perfectly usable, generally.
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.
Came her to say this. There are things I still don't like about it, but reducing transparency has helped a lot. The rest I'm willing to live with (as if I had any choice...)
I think there are a few nice changes in 26, but they’re small things.
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.
Yeah it grew on me over the beta phase, now when I hold an iPhone not updated it feels old and I really don’t like previous versions.
Regardless of places where it’s not ideal implementations yet, I can’t see myself coming back to the previous style. Liquid Glass will get better and I really like it. I got wow moments sometimes when it shines on some occasions
I think the idea of a new design of some sort was a good one. We’ve been in the same world since iOS 7, 12 years ago.
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 completely agree with you.
And sometimes depending on the content it’s unreadable that’s for sure.
But they must have an endgame. Maybe they get us used to the UI, users will complain and in 6 months will get used to it and in a year it’s forgotten & updated.
Because if they have a new paradigm then it’s easier for them if people are already used to the UX I guess ?
I guess that’s my problem. At this point I don’t trust that they DO have an endgame. I think this WAS it and they just ignored all the problems.
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.
I agree, from all the directions to make their UX foundation evolve that’s the weirdest one. If they don’t have anything else that make sense for it all then it’s the start of the decline for them I guess. I hate android UX, I tried and I hate it, Samsung is the worst for me.
I tried that, but this completely removes the transparency, and some apps look even worse and harder to visualise as it’s not designed to not have the transparency on iOS 26.
This could be significant improvement if Apple let us choose the transparency percentage.
It makes some things better. But it also replaces transparency in some apps with just a solid block of colour. Photos you lose like 10-20% of the screen. The UI used to fit and work well and they just broke it. Maddening.
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.
I certainly won't be upgrading to this version. I already don't really like the current version and see no reason to inflict a Windows Vista-like experience on myself.
Any specific apps? I'm not having performance issues on an iPhone SE 3, which should be a lot less powerful, but perhaps I haven't bumped into them. Or maybe apps use different resources on a less powerful phone?
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.
Only for a very limited time after the release. And you can’t strictly “downgrade“ it, you have to restore it from factory with the older OS and then reload your back up.
No, you can go back for a while. They’ll certainly ask you, but you can say no.
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.
They’re getting bolder about pushing you to upgrade with badges on settings and push notifications and defaulting people into automatic updates.
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 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.
I made the mistake of upgrading (13 Mini) and it is very clear that the new UI was not tested at all on smaller screens. The rounded buttons take up so much extra margin that actual usable space is greatly diminished.
Same here - on a 12 Mini. My wife and my mother have the same phone, and I have recommended that they hold back on upgrading.
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 have the standard iPhone 13 (not mini) and the battery longevity is probably the best of any phone I've ever owned. At over 3.5 years old it still reports 89% battery health and lasts much longer than I need. Previous iPhones I owned were all pretty much on their last legs by that age.
I haven't upgraded it to iOS 26 / Liquid Glass, though, and given what I'm seeing/hearing, I don't plan to.
I just replaced it before the 26 upgrade. It was at 76% by then. With the new battery, I haven’t faced any issues. It lasts a whole day easily, unless I do things like tethering etc.
I regret upgrading my 13 Mini so much. Performance is terrible and it's chugging power.
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.
I have an iphone 13 pro max. On many screens, the UI now stutters when it was smooth before. I have a very strong dislike for the new transparency changes. It absolutely makes things harder to read. And it comes at a cost of making the UI stutter. For example I just scrolled down the notifications, they are all a little harder to read because the the phone is trying to show the background through the notification area?
For what it’s worth, I upgraded to 26 on a 3rd gen SE and perf is totally fine. I do hate most of the UI changes though. I really hope they do a dot release that lets me turn off the “safari viewport is big but we draw crap on top of it” stuff. I keep cursing at the title bar and url bar obscuring important things.
It's functionally tolerable when you disable transparency and increase contrast in accessibility settings.
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.
It was running well on my 13 pro as in there was no lag on anything, but I can’t speak for battery life. It was bad before and it was still bad after, but maybe it got worse?
iOS .0 releases tend to be this way, even on brand new devices. I noticed some big perf improvements on the 26.0.1 release. If I were you I'd wait til 26.1 or 26.2 and reassess then. It still may not be optimal for a mini tho for non-perf reasons, as iOS26 assumes a larger average device size.
On iPhone 12 mini, the battery life is incredibly worse. I was charging once a day, 30 → 70% usually, and now I’m charging all the time I have a chance. I’m not very active user, but each session of screen time reduces the battery significantly. Before that I felt that despite the small battery, the device works forever. Now, I’m back into my iPhone 4S times, when I upgraded to iOS 7.
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.
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.
I just think that Apple should go down to biannual phone updates and major OS versions. I really don’t understand the urgency behind forcing this kind of velocity for such a mature system. It seems perpetually rushed.
This style of simulating faux-realistic materials (such as glass or aluminum) on the screen looks dated and cheesy now -- (Windows engineering team 2012)
Oh wow, a statement like this coming from a blog entry about creating windows 8??
Maybe it has to do with that I‘m Gen Z but I absolutely love Frutiger Aero. It never looked cheesy, first it was modern then it was nostalgic. All meanwhile I still have trauma from the hideous Metro tiles.
I'm also gen Z. For me the reaction to Windows Aero was similar, but I guess that's just how it is because it's what we grew up with. The blog post is talking about imitating materials in general though, and I can totally see how it can be taken too far. Think putting wood PNGs as backgrounds for app elements or adding brushed aluminium textures on sliders, things like those look pretty dated to me now. I'm guessing the Microsoft designers just had a far lower tolerance for that stuff, since IMO Windows 7 was very tame in terms of this - it felt just abstractly transparent and shiny more than skeuomorphic.
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.
> Think putting wood PNGs as backgrounds for app elements or adding brushed aluminium textures on sliders, things like those look pretty dated to me now.
This was a late 90s/early 2000s thing. I remember it on some Win98 and XP applications.
Nah, it persisted in many places, in some to lesser extents than others. It feels like in the 90s it was more of a "look, we can make UIs so flashy now!" thing, which then morphed into an actual design philosophy. See for example the Apple Newsstand app from iOS 6 [0] or lots of VST plugins from any time period, even up to today [1]
Must be a Gen Z meme because it was traumatic for those that lived it. It reminds me of Windows Vista and, my god, the first few years of KDE 4 - it has taken me until last year to try KDE again (and finally it has shed it’s silly hard contrast black transparency phase)
Gen Z like it because of nostalgia, not because of quality or because it actually looks any good.
I have to agree. Windows Aero is a visual mess, especially on Vista, and many of the comparable UXes of the time were not much better. Apple's Aqua UI was the best of the bunch, and it still looked like a child's toy.
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.
Aero was kind of a mess in Vista, but improved substantially in 7 (and a lot of that was due to more frosted glass look / less transparency). I would still rate 7 as the best balance of usability and eye candy that Windows has ever had, and I've used all of them heavily starting with Win 3.1.
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.
Yes making everything skeuomorphic is the ultimate finger in Ivy’s eye for no apparent reason other than it was very different and got some designers promoted. They had to answer the “iOS isn’t changing a lot” with something so they went with the dumbest regression ever.
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.
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.
The amount of obvious visual flaws is crazy. On an iPhone, play a video in Picture-in-Picture then hide it off the edge of the screen. The corner radius of the arrow control and the video underneath it are different so you can see the video poking through
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 agree. I think that the criticisms on legibility are extremely biased. In my experience, the real issues with Liquid Glass are in terms of decreased usable space, less discoverability of actions that were previously top-level, and most importantly (and rather objectively), battery life.
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.
How is criticizing legibility of text-on-text "extremely biased"? This is basic UX.
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.
decreased usable space is definitely my biggest gripe, especially on Tahoe.
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).
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.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the Liquid Glass redesign was something they had to push out the door to distract from the absolute trainwreck that is Apple Intelligence.
> 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.
I work at a FAANG (but not Apple) -- your characterization is accurate, and I think it's important to not "shoot the messenger" here. The team of UX+SWEs probably made valiant efforts to reify some "vision" from a higher-up who cannot be contradicted.
It reminds me of Visual Studio 2012, back when some higher ups decided that the way to "align" with Windows 8 and its Metro design language was to switch the main menu to use ALL CAPS.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you head over to digital artistry-related subreddits / other forums, they are almost uniformly very strongly against this due to the major UX regressions in iPadOS for their typical use cases (i.e. touch-based multitasking having been ruined)
But yes agreed, it is mind-boggling to me how broadly well-received this has been
It's crazy that they removed split view and slide over from the iPad. The new window management is still extremely fiddly. It takes now 7 steps to open another app next to the current one, and a few more steps to get them all full screen again.
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 new windowing system is actually rather decent when used with a keyboard + all window tiling / maximising / app switching keyboard shortcuts memorised. Although the lack of Slide Over is still inexplicable and sucks.
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]
It looks so easy on the video. If I try to drag a full screen window it only works in 20% of the cases. In the other cases either one of those things happen: menu bar opens, widgets opens, control center opens, lock screen opens, or I tap some controls in the app.
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.
I completely agree and I just put in the bit about the keyboard shortcuts to pre-empt comments from the minority of iPad users who never remove the iPad from their Magic Keyboard saying they quite like the update.
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.
Yeah some niches are complaining, but mainstream content seems to be positive to neutral. I understand that people like MKBHD can't badmouth such a big player without risking loss of access, but not even clickbait content creators seem to be aware that the king has no clothes.
> I see extreme issues and regressions literally everywhere
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.
.0 releases tend to have certain bugs, but not to this degree.
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.
Aesthetic glitches are everywhere, though it’s hard to tell when behavior is intended. Can you read the context of my texts? https://ibb.co/mVbVpYCD
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.
Oh I know that UI, it’s when you slide the notification center from the top. That’s a conscious action with an animation so yes the context of modality is understandable there.
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 keep reading about all the memory leaks and have been staying far away. Lots of people reporting slowdowns and crashes and not being able to launch new apps. That just shows really bad QA across not just one app or the OS but across the whole process. Probably the hurry to get out a new OS version every year instead of every couple
I'm not surprised since I think most UI overhauls replace one system with another that is roughly equally good, except that nobody is familiar with the new system so everyone burns a bunch of time and attention learning the new one just to get back to par. The new UI often isn't worse in any objective sense, it's just not better and the whole exercise is a giant waste of everyone's time.
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 rarely improves above and beyond the level from which it had plummeted, though. More often you get tweaks to reduce the major annoyances to tolerable level. Which users then tolerate because, well, what other choice do they have when literally everyone is doing it?
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.
The transition with iOS 7 was a usability downgrade, and iOS 26 is now another usability downgrade. That people are complaining about both of them is perfectly justified.
Yea I’m tempted to upgrade because I assume that people just don’t like change. But then seeing nn group doesn’t like it isn’t a great sign. Definitively going to wait and see what people say in a few months.
To be fair, the article on the NN site has a top banner with current section which occupies at least a third of a screen and makes it not very pleasant to read on the iphone.
I don’t understand why usability experts’ website has worse experience than 90% of the web?
Hey, but the release of iOS 7 was the worst release in the entire history of iOS releases. At least my personal impression is so. This release completes with that. So I agree, sure thing, we can substitute iOS 7 for iOS 26, and it would be the same. But what’s the sameness we discuss? Is it some corporate culture that inevitably brings us the mediocrity, or us, the users, being thankless plebes with some weird wishes of usability? To me, that’s the first, obviously. You leave them alone for a while and they’ll bring you … this.
You can actually swipe up from the search field at the bottom and that will show all tabs. (If anyone is reading this from apple, that animation should be sped up).
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.
As a long time Android user, I find these magical gestures frustrating difficult to discover. How on earth is someone supposed to guess such a gesture exists, and how am I supposed to guess the rules for when certain gestures work and certain gestures don’t?
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?
You can also swipe left and right to switch tabs, in any state.
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.
So many changes over the years and some of them might actually be decent but I wouldn’t have known about this had I not read this comment or accidentally triggered it in the future. Has Apple experimented with “micro” tutorials that can pop up if they detect the user is performing an action in an inefficient/deprecated pattern? I.e. if in Safari I navigate to all tabs by tapping at the bottom —> hamburger icon —> all tabs a one time modal pops up showing the ux pattern they recommend
I hate micro tutorials so much, I really don't like when things have an invisible language that you have to just know to be able to use them.
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"
Swiping left or right on the screen is the special “please misinterpret my attempt to scroll as a ‘forward’ or ‘back’ command, eliciting a curse” gesture. I have searched for a way to disable this many times.
That swipe sucks because it’s almost identical to the “swipe up from bottom” home screen swipe. You have to be precise, and the initial UI feedback looks very similar between the two.
> Luckily, Apple is ok at supporting older phones, so I just have to be careful to not accidentally upgrade my SE to iOS 26.
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.
> Too often, however, the computer acts and the user merely reacts within a limited set of options. In other instances, the computer “takes care” of the user, offering only those alternatives that are judged “good” for the user or that “protect” the user from having to make detailed decisions. This approach mistakenly puts the computer, not the user, in control.
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.
I initially balked at this change but realized they placed the 'all tabs' button right where the ellipsis menu is, so you can just double tap to get to your tabs. Takes the same amount of time.
>Fortunately, the software capability to handle different text sizes
can make it easier to support people with a vision disability. You can design
your software with a “zoom” feature that increases the size of characters or
graphics on the screen.
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.
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.
I imagine it's a lot easier to show you're developing code by redesigning things than it is to do the work to figure out fixes to harder bugs with unclear tradeoffs or work to create new directions for the company. New UI is just exciting enough to fool some people into thinking it's still fresh.
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).
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.
I'm also pushing the upgrade of my Xs year after year now. It runs fine on iOS 18, and it still gets security updates (the newer models didn't get 18.7).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I just booted up my G4 Cube running 10.2 and lemme tell you that aquagel looks 10x better, especially on at 1600x1200 on a Trinitron. Gorgeous, fun, clear delineation of content, with just maybe a bit too much transparency in a few spots.
It went too far (I think the subdued Aqua of 10.9 was peak), but no where near as bad as Glarse.
Do they actually like it or do they like that it’s new?
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.
You literally just need to pull the notification drawer down to see how horrible Liquid Glass is. You know, one of the most common gestures on any smartphone today.
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.
FWIW on my phone I don't have a problem with it at all, probably because it doesn't run into the same performance limitations.
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.
Interesting, it seems just as smooth on my OnePlus 13. As an app developer I don't see how the Material 3 Expressive UI would cause reduced performance. My only guess is poor usage of the API by developers.
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.
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 don't like how everything seems to require extra clicks or has extra animation now. For example, the workout selection has a weird feeling like it's fluid and everything just kind of scrolls along. Then when you stop on something long enough, the rest of the UI elements like the start / play button show up.
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.
The really pathetic thing about this... Linux has had the capability to do this for years. About 20 years ago, I was playing with compiz, and turned on every single effect. Window dragging with transparency, bubbly windows that would snap into place, windows that would resize with an elastic-looking snap, switching entire desktops with cube animations. Animations were smooth and fluid, and didn't even drop a frame. That was 20 years ago, running on really low end Intel integrated graphics. There's no excuse for this laggyness. These are basic animations that GPUs should handle just fine. I mean hell, we were rendering full 3d environments with realistic water effects like 10+ years ago on GPUs that can't even begin to compare with what we have today. Your GPU can't even handle a tiny little animated button today? WTF?
I have a Series 10 and I haven't experienced either of those problems. Other than the PIN entry screen being very "glassy", it's not actually that different. Perhaps you have some other issue.
I doubt the bulk of battery life is lost in visual effects, especially if turning them off apparently does not help.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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
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 quite like it and I think iOS 26 largely works really well. But MacOS 26 has been quite buggy for me, it seems to have gotten better with the latest patch but I’m still seeing semi regular issues.
I've been using a grass wallpaper and lock screen on all my devices for something like 15 years now. It works great if you don't go out of your way to break it and then blame the user.
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.
This intended effect is clearly not achieved when the final result looks busier, animates and shines to rob attention from the content and reduces visibility.
If this is how you're going to build your web UIs going forward, take note from Apple here - add an A11Y mode. These changes exclusively harm the overall contrast of the UI and it's unfair to expect visually impaired users to deal with your visual clutter for the sake of r/unixporn eye candy.
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.
Yeah reduced motion would probably toggle opaque backgrounds as well. But you can't really get that glass shader with css anyways so I imagine there wouldn't be many transparent effects, it's more just the layout I'm talking about for web.
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.
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 did the same on Tahoe and now the formerly glass buttons are grey with a weird blue shadow in the upper left. One example: the sound slider on the menu bar. With all the GFX turned on, it is a transparent blob, with the reduced settings, it's just a weird gray with a nonsensical shadow.
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.
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.
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.
It looks worse in screenshots than it does to use. I saw a few images on reddit that looked quite bad, but then when I actually used it I saw those screenshots were taken in the middle of animations or transitions that last only a handful of frames.
Indeed, it's telling that the first screenshot they are using to illustrate the problem is a iMessage screenshot, with a high contrast background image, only one message and images in a similar color theme as the background image.
If you want high contrast in your messages app...don't use a high contrast background image?
That picture just feels like a case study in why Apple drug their feet on features like that for so long. If you let people set a background and change the font, you're going to have unreadable purple comic sans over kittens within minutes.
On my iphone 13 pro max when I pull down the notification drawers, the list stutters heavily, every single time. I am assuming this is because the phone is trying to animate things while keeping the notifications semi-transparent. Why do I need to see what is behind the notifications? Transparency on such commonly used functions are not just unnecessary, they add negative value. Add to that the stutters that did not exist before and you have the making of a frustrating experience.
I agree. I don't like change and I'm usually the first to criticise, but it's fine. Some of the animations feel nice, but I'm yet to see anything that wows or upsets me.
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.
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 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.
I have an Android phone from samsung.. they send ads on the default Google Messages app, and due to some rich text formatting unlike a regular SMS it takes space in my notifications menu.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Remember that iOS 18 was over a decade of evolution on the design changes in iOS 7, which also had a significant amount of hate when it was released for being ugly, confusing, and hard to read.
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.
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.
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.
More like “how do we shovel the UX of a very niche, overpriced product that barely anyone will use (Vision Pro) on everyone that uses a recent-ish Apple product?”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
13 Mini here, and yesterday for the first time since I bought, the battery died on me in the middle of the day, in the office, with my regular usage (which is very low).
It also made my iPhone 16 Pro Max a bit laggier, but the worst offender is my Apple Watch Series 10 which has a big frame rate drop every time there is a Liquid Glass animation. It feels very sluggish now and the battery seems worse than before. Everyone is impacted to different extents, I don’t think it’s deliberately made to cripple older iPhones.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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."
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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 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.
> The basics of visual design are made up qualitative guidelines with no solid metrics to back it up.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
Beyond that, it’s buggy and inconsistent. In dark mode, text boxes suddenly become light mode when they expand to add a second entry line. Buttons aren’t aligned within their containers properly. Some times buttons are in light mode when my phone is in dark mode, or if I open an app, it starts out in light mode and then suddenly switches to dark mode after a second or two. There is a noticeable lag when I back out of a message before it loads the other conversations in iMessage.
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.
In my opinion Liquid Glass is still an alpha release. Nothing is really finished, it's conceptually unfinished, the changes are not well thought through, and it's really buggy.
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.
Liquid Glass was clearly rushed to cover for the total failure of Apple Intelligence.
Even the design being criticized distracts from fraudulently selling phones based on features never shipped.
The recently presented ChatGPT apps are what Apple Intelligence (and Siri) should've been. Some chat/voice interface, that can access data from installed apps and trigger actions.
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.
I think this will be an Apple Maps situation. Embarrassing initially, but a few years later, there’ll be a perfectly usable product.
I still find Apple Maps to be awful. It consistently gives poor directions. For example the exit you need to take from the closest major road to reach my neighborhood splits once you are on it. If you continue straight you reach a stop light where you can then take a left and then continue 1/8th of a mile to the turn for my neighborhood. Apple Maps will instead have you go to the right when the exit splits and then have you continue another 1/2 mile before taking a u-turn and heading back the 5/8ths of a mile to turn into my neighborhood. Google Maps does the right thing. I now warn visitors to use Google Maps or to ignore these directions from Apple Maps.
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.
the whole maps debacle was a plot against Forstall
A 'plot'? That must be some kind of weird online conspiracy theory. Apple Maps worked poorly on initial release for reasons that are entirely unmysterious (the lack of comprehensive and accurate geographical data). Forstall was of course fired as an eventual result of this, but the idea that the whole PR disaster was engineered as part of a scheme to oust him is just daft.
Apple still has an ultimate advantage.
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.
Yes, Apple still has the advantage over OpenAI. But OpenAI can also release some iOS and Android integration layer, that allows to connect with installed apps on the device.
If Apple doesn't get their act together with the next iOS release, it could be too late.
OpenAI can't, they're completely dependent on Apple and Google permitting such a thing. Unless you have a particular way in mind they could currently achieve this?
They can integrate into third party apps, if the publishers want to. A lot of them are going to do it.
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 doubt this will be super successful because so many of the apps that people would want to integrate it are those made by Apple, Google, Meta and others whose goal is to be a direct competitor. I might be wrong though, we'll see.
This is what I was getting at. Permissions in an app are one thing, but if Apple or Google wanted to they could go way deeper.
Also, I think they will work through bugs, but the losers with the older devices aren’t going to get it.
This is a fun one I think:
- 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
One of the issues is almost certainly that the app developers didn't add the UIDesignRequiresCompatibility = YES[0] item to the Info.plist.
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...
I’m referring entirely to built-in Apple apps - Mail, Messages, etc. The in-house apps can’t even get it right, which to me means:
- 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.
Such reclusiveness is not an obligatory property of large corporations. Say, Google around 2011-2015 may have had fiefdoms, but at least things were quite transparent, you could know what other departments are doing, and see all the code. Facebook circa 2020 was surprisingly transparent and peer-to-peer, at least in the area I touched, messaging and storage infra. I've seen companies 1000x smaller that had incomparably more reclusiveness and opaqueness.
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.
Apple’s Mail app has been intensely buggy for years, and the bugs rarely get fixed.
(Search is comically bad.)
Search is so so bad. I just want to find an email with a word in it. All my Apple Devices fail at this.
Search is bad everywhere. If I open Settings, and then search for application $X, no results. If I search for $Y, $Y shows up. They are alphabetically next to each other, and I can see them both if I open the Applications submenu and scroll down to access individual app settings.
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.
A lot of them are SwiftUI apps.
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.
It’s so bizarre. I wanted to use it for a menu extra and something as simple as animating the icon couldn’t be done. There are several of Apple’s own apps that use animated Menu extra icons and they’re probably doing the same hybrid AppKit/SwiftUI workarounds.
I won’t use UIViewRepresentable. I feel that it’s a kludge, and kind of negates the whole purpose of SwiftUI. I know that some of the “native” types are probably UIViewRepresentable, under the covers (like maps), but I feel as if it’s a “duct tape” solution. Also, some of the code gymnastics that I need to do, in order to implement “non-standard” functionality, are pretty crazy. SwiftUI makes it absurdly easy to do stuff that follows the intended workflow, but completely falls down, if you stray off the path. UIKit complains, but grudgingly goes along with you.
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.
> One of the issues is almost certainly that the app developers didn't add the UIDesignRequiresCompatibility = YES[0] item to the Info.plist.
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.
Sounds like it was QAd by AI.
If it were implemented as intended, it would just be very ugly, slower, and a waste of battery life. But a lot of it is really just broken. In the past hour, I saw a number of funny glitches. The funny glitches are better than the glitches where things crash or hang.
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.
> On MacOS, it even requires running terminal commands at startup to fix performance regressions.
You can't just say that and not share the goods
Sorry about that, caveat that these are commands I found online which I don't honestly entirely know what they do. They seem harmless enough.
You don't need to tell people to update to 26 though? it's easy enough to keep updating 15.x as long as mac keeps pumping out security updates.
This is hitting people who aren't tech-savvy particularly hard
I 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).
Just from my anecdata, I know someone whose dad stopped responding to voicemails since he was confused by the new app, and another person whose parents both using iPhone SEs (2020 / 2022 version) who also really don't like it. (They upgraded because I'm always talking about software updates- feels bad.)
I suppose an upvote should be sufficient, but I am so unhappy with the new UI I am actually holding off switching to a new M4 MBP and sticking to my old M1 still on Sequoia 15.7.1. I also try to give these things time and I am usually ok with the changes eventually, but the new UI elements are so incredibly distracting it's actually affecting my ability to focus on what I'm actually doing.
At least with Macs you are free to choose and downgrade to any OS version that you like, so long as that version supports your hardware. macOS 15.7.1 will run just fine on any M4 Mac, and Apple will likely continue to release 15.x updates for a year or so yet, and security updates even beyond that.
It's not like iOS where, once updated, you're generally blocked from ever downgrading back to a previous OS version.
I decided to postpone an iPhone upgrade for another year rather than be forced to use iOS 26 without a downgrade option. This is the only way to send a signal.
I upgraded iOS after I discovered that the AirPods Pro 3 lose native integration with iOS 18 and macOS 15. Hated it so much, I sent the AirPods Pro 3 back for discounted AirPods Pro 2 and am considering trading my upgraded iPhone in for the latest model I can get on iOS 18.
I'm going to ride iOS 18 and macOS 15 into the sunset and then leave the Apple ecosystem.
Thanks, that’s very good to know. I was actually eyeing the new AirPods, and it didn’t even occur to me that their functionality is tied to the iOS version. Now they’ve become just another thing to skip.
They still work as generic Bluetooth earphones, including ANC and transparency, but they don’t show up in FindMy and you can’t control case charging sounds or notification volume.
These extra proprietary features are the main reason to pick AirPods over some non-Apple headphones.
No, the way to send a signal is to buy it and return.
The M4 MBP, even if it comes pre-installed with Tahoe, can still be downgraded to Sequoia via DFU restore. The real cut-off will be the M5 Macs, which only Tahoe and above will have hardware support for.
Apart from the usual suspect of "modern" UI designers needlessly changing stuff to justify their job, it is my personal opinion that the SwiftUI framework is one of the root causes of Apple's piss-poor software UX and performance. For anything apart from very simple bog-standard views, that framework becomes bewildering with a high cognitive burden and simply does not scale well when any kind of customization is needed.
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.
IMO at Apple the feedback loops seem to have gotten longer. They took a lot of time to discontinue the butterfly keyboards, bring magsafe back, etc. So it's likely that they'll double down on this OS/ UX than correct their path soon. I am not saying that they don't care. But I haven't seen statements like 'we made a mistake', or even 'you are holding it wrong', etc. This- not caring to be answerable to the end user, along with other perceptions in this thread (like siloed teams, bugs in their own apps) makes me think that Apple has become a somewhat dysfunctional enterprise. If they are going down that path, maybe they should hire SAFe Agile consultants. :-)
Disclaimer: Don't follow Apple or HN a lot. And these opinions are maybe more of my perceptions than facts. Open to corrections.
I know it's shit. But for all of you, regardless of whether it's Mac OS or iOS, go to accessibility options and enable high contrast. It removes transparency/liquid glass.
Wow. Disabling Transparency makes a huge difference on my iPhone 13 (sluggish, stuttering animations -> smooth af). Thanks!
Yes. I was iffy on contrast, but after a day I made the same change on all my devices. I decided i really like well defined borders on things.
Legend, thank you.
Increase contrast + reduce transparency did it for me.
Yup! it's called differently depending if you're on iOS or Mac OS. just try enabling everything and see what works for you :)
Thank you for this tip. iOS feels so much better now!
Also check Reduce Motion and the whole OS will feel more stable even if it’s only an illusion.
That has long been an important setting for anyone who suffers from vertigo
I just bought a M4 MBA, my first since a 2014 MBP. I absolutely hated the 26 update on my phone and iPad but honestly don’t even notice it on my MacBook.
On my Mac I almost laugh at how massive the borders are to accommodate the freakishly large corner radius. The next version might have round windows at this pace.
Get a glimpse of your favorite apps with our new Apple Peephole technology!
Those corners are just weird. The 3rd party apps are all still doing the old radius which highlights how pointlessly large the new radius is.
I found that there's one upside to it: the empty space "outside" the corner still counts as part of the window, but it also works as a hot corner for drag and drop window resizing purposes.
That said, it's still comically large, and actually intrudes onto app UI in some cases, especially with scrollbars.
Same. I'm just not someone with strong feelings about UX consistency or appearance, and tend to focus on functionality.
But this...this feels like a symptom of something fundamental inside Apple going wrong.
The only time before this I've felt like Apple took a huge UX or appearance dive on an OS upgrade was iOS6 -> iOS7. People complain about almost every macOS upgrade, but the closest they've come to bothering me is that I hated the new tab styles in desktop Safari they introduced a while ago, but that was configurable so I just set it back to normal and that was that. I've disliked other things (the Touch Bar was never anything but a way for me to accidentally open Music—I basically had to disable it to make any of those MacBooks usable) but never really been bothered by an OSX/macOS update's appearance.
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.
Heh, I submitted a complaint with Apple every day until they reverted those Safari tab styles. Awful design. There is something deeply broken inside Apple allowing these broken, awful designs get out.
People are getting paid based on how many changes they effect.
I thought the strength of Apple design, historically, was the resistance to this middle-manager BS. Apple pushed out UI changes just to keep the pot boiling, so to speak, but it generally all made sense together, which suggests strong governance.
P.S. thank you for using the correct form of “effect”!
The touchbar was great, but it should have been above the (half height) function keys. Had they done that, it would still be around.
“No one wants an actual touch screen, but they definitely want a really narrow touchscreen directly above their keyboard. It’s contextual.”
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.
> No one wants an actual touch screen, but they definitely want a really narrow touchscreen directly above their keyboard. It’s contextual
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.
Just like big screens on phones weren’t ergonomic and a stylus for a tablet meant the tablet interface had failed. It’s a bad idea right until Apple does it. (Which is not to say that Apple might not do it better if/when they decide to do it.)
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.
Same boat. I started with the third public beta on my iPhone and the UX overhaul has not grown much on me. I reversed the Safari layout back to the previous, the combined Phone sections are not intuitive (and I almost reversed back to the previous with that too), the lock screen change is not bad but also not bringing more usability... The lack of new lock screen widgets is baffling. The overall appearance... it's hideous. Everything looks unfocused/muddy, colors look gross, readability is down and practically everything is clunky. I changed my Home Screen apps to all clear so I wouldn't have to look are the loud and oversaturated colors. Def not Apple's best work and confusing how we got here. The spam filtering for texts and phone calls is the prize change for the entire OS, which is funny because Apple Intelligence is still somewhat worthless even a year and a big update later. Genmoji, the only good thing about it, still fails 50%+ of the time.
The transparency thing stopped being cute when I couldn't easily differentiate between Gmail, ProtonMail, and Apple Mail. These icons had color, used that color to differentiate them.
I don't think this is atypical, we have color screens for a reason.
The glass style for iOS app icons is completely idiotic. It's optional though. It doesn't even look good, it just makes the home screen look a little less crowded, but the UX is horrible.
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.
Same here. I was about to order a new MacBook recently, but there’s been a lot of small issues annoying me over the past few years and Liquid Glass was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me.
Back to Linux for me. Ended up ordering a Thinkpad X1 Carbon instead, and am planning to throw Fedora on it.
I'd be ambivalent about it if it didn't ship broken. My Mac updated the other day and I don't think I've seen the glass top bar work correctly once. In fullscreen in particular it doesn't work at all, the background that it's meant to be blurring gets stuck and never changes, so it just looks like shit and is nearly unreadable. I'm not on any beta track or anything so this is what normal people get. I have no idea how they felt good shipping it.
I always wait for each point release and see if complaints are up or down. I can adjust to about any UI, as long as 80-90% stays the same. For example I ditched windows almost completely at 8 when they left the classic look and went for tablet mode. That's when I went to Mac, I'd been an avid linux user since the 90s though. What I can't put up with are bugs, so I wait out reviews and such from actual technical people and tech sites like reddit and hackernews. It's a policy that hasn't failed me yet.
You can finally see senders’ and receivers’ email address properly in the mail app. Something positive!
For the first time ever, I haven’t yet updated to the new version of iOS.
From reading this thread I’m glad I’m not alone. It seems their “compact” mode has a bunch of invisible gestures that you’re just supposed to know about.
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.
It’s flashy for the sake of flashy and poorly done. It’s tacky.
I can’t believe Apple shipped this.
This article gave me hope that when I finally have to upgrade my Mac to keep up with system requirements for software updates on third-party apps, maybe I won't hate it as much as I expected to. It's a mess, but the screenshots in this article give me hope that it doesn't have to be a complete and total disaster.
[0] How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface:
0: https://tidbits.com/2025/10/09/how-to-turn-liquid-glass-into...
Honest question, I run with a black background I didn’t notice anything major going to Tahoe outside of my battery life taking a major hit.
What are some of the elements that have major impact?
It looks pretty (sometimes) but I have not found a single usability improvement stemming from the new paradigm.
One thing I’ve noticed is that search fields are now generally at the bottom of the screen which makes them a lot easier to activate. (No more flicking the screen down to search).
I disliked the update for a week or so at first, but I have to say I find the liquid animations fun now.
> 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.
These aren’t animations that add any time: a lot of the liquid UI elements are just fun to fidget with while bored
True, the search fields are in a better position now, but this really has nothing to do with the liquid glass paradigm. This could have been done in the previous designs just as well, I think.
fun?
It’s terrible from a UX standpoint. By definition, translucent elements present more potential information to a user. It makes it harder to parse certain screens. It’s a nightmare if you have subtle vision issues (where it’s not bad enough you’d need to enable accessibility options). You’re not going to “get used to it” — you’re really just adapting to a crippled interface.
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.
Not even form over function, it's fucking ugly. How did this get past the draft board?
Prioritizing AR-type UX elements to make adoption of future apple AR devices easier?
The problem is designs and elements that were carefully considered and crafted for Vision OS don't always translate well when grafted into iOS and macOS. What looks elegant and modern in AR can look garish, distracting, and old-fashioned on a more traditional device.
It honestly wouldn't bee too bad on macOS if they kept this mostly to the window chrome, or things that really need to float. But adding this to all the toolbar buttons, in Safari and Finder looks just like some 3rd party theme hack, it's really tacky. They also didn't seem to consider dark mode well or at all.
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’d rather an app look consistent with iOS than look consistent with an android version I don’t use.
And what about online tutorials, marketing, user manuals, customer support? You probably want your app to look consistent with that too, right? Do you really expect or even want to sift through multiple different versions of tutorials and guides?
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.
> As long as an app is easy to use, people prefer a single look
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!
Most people only have one mobile device, a smartphone. Those that have more than one usually still have those with matched OSes. No-one cares about "looking like the OS", but people do care about looking (and, more importantly, behaving) like all the other apps they use.
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.
Until you want to explain to your friend or elderly parent with a different phone how to use the app.
If the app is Blender, or some other extremely complex software then sure. If it’s the bank app or social media, it would take me no time to understand the difference between the iOS and Android native UI.
And devs would rather the opposite.
Devs are not the customers
And most customers don't actually care much, so long as the app works and is performant.
Apps are for users, not for devs.
Subzero
You were wrong to even attempt to share design language across platforms. You should make your applications good native citizens if you have any respect for your users, because yours isn’t the only software they use.
That’s a pretty bold statement. Look at the most popular apps, and you will see across Android and iOS that the designs across platforms are more similar than they are different. We only have 2 engineers right now, but we still maintain clean native implementations for navigation, interactions, and areas where native UI excels. Neither our Android or iOS apps appear as if we just copy-pasted from one platform to the other. Both Android and iOS had been leaning into flat design for years, so it was easy to adapt the same design language for our brand across both. Not so with this return of skeuomorphic design.
I think this idealism reveals a naive viewpoint about what users really care about. They care that apps work - that they do what they're supposed to and do it fast or efficiently. Not even Microsoft makes apps for their own platform that are native apps (example Teams, the new Outlook), and they service millions of users. Indeed, if you look at Microsoft's UI over the years, they are inconsistent as hell (all of the Office apps throughout the years is a good example), but so long as performance, functionality and usability hasn't suffered too much, users are OK with non-native apps that do not appear native. Another example is iTunes on Windows - looks nothing like a native Windows app.
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 own design language in iOS7, and now with iOS26 they've done it again.
They ditched their 30-pin dock with the iPhone 5, and then chucked Lightning in favor of USB-C with the iPhone 15.
On desktop that ship has sailed. Maybe 2 of my regularly used apps have a native design.
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.
It hasn't fully done so on the desktop when you consider macOS. E.g. if you ship a macOS app which has the main menu bar inside the window (or missing entirely) instead of using the system menu bar, it will look very jarring and users will rightly complain.
I think this depends on the context.
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.
The trend over the past decade has been towards multiplatform frameworks, mostly with React Native, but more recently Flutter, KMP, and even Swift multiplatform.
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.
Our large commercial apps were certified to pass the WCAG accessibility requirements, which we need to comply with for legal reasons. If we did’t enable the compatibility flag and opt out of the glass altogether, this would have meant massive breakages and regressions, which would require the designer and developer time to fix, and the financial burden of having to go through the certification process again. And all because of Apple’s whims and zero benefits for our customers or our developers. Why would we blindly choose to follow Apple’s missteps instead of having our own design system and standards?
I grew up with stuff like Kai's Power Goo [0] so it doesn't bother me at all when developers step out of the box and bring a wacky UI!
[0] https://youtu.be/xt06OSIQ0PE?t=266
I don't think that's true. First line of respect is good UI/UX, second line of respect is being fast/not being slow, third might be being coherent with the rest of the apps on that platform.
As a developer, I don't care what Apple or Google's "design language" whims are today. If someone can't figure out how to use a well designed app, no matter the "design language", a fancy skin isn't going to fix that.
> You should make your applications good native citizens
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.
> taking the time to make a sexy native UI
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.
If you're starting from the perspective of a native app developer, you're absolutely correct. However, most startups are going to be websites/Electron/CEF apps. It's much easier and cheaper to write-once-ship-everywhere with an ugly React UI than it is to jump through the hoops of writing special-snowflake versions for every OS under the sun.
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.
It depends who your application is for. You obviously think building an application is about maximizing your profit, and your users are just a means to achieve that. If you were approaching your application from a “what’s best for my users” angle you might make different choices.
If you are running a business with limited funding (which is most businesses), then your primary need is to seek profit in a world where profit is often never achieved at all. Otherwise, your business ceases to exist, along with your app. Sometimes that does mean emphasis on strong design, which I’d argue means delivering a great experience to your users rather than a native or non-native design choice. Other times, you’re serving a demographic that doesn’t care so much about that, and your focus is on functionality above all.
What's best for the users is often more "having the web app and app being the same" than "having it be different on every platform".
Almost nobody uses both an iPhone and Android for their day to day use. It doesn’t matter if your iOS and Android apps don’t look share the same design language, no one is going to see both of them.
Integrate into each OS as much as you can.
It matters because engineering time can be better spent improving the app functionality itself.
And it’s not about the two platforms looking the same, sometimes you just want your own look.
And it’s easy to see in websites since no one uses the base system design for ui.
And most apps that eschew the base design system while using the same kinds of GUI elements it provides, are usually terrible. Only when the app does something way out of the lane of what the OS provides does it usually work well.
It would be a waste of effort to adopt Liquid Glass now. Even Apple hasn't figured it out yet.
The new UI breaks existing conventions, and isn't even self-consistent. You're not helping users by jumping into that chaos.
> 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.
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)
honestly I'd wait for a while - betas are changing the design each time, which is its own issue. app devs don't have a fixed target to go for.
Aren't betas over?
This is the full release version ios26 which we will be living with for at least one year
Not really, the point versions have betas as well. I'm on 26.1 beta 2 on iOS.
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.
I don't have accessibility issues, but even so I've been a fan of these settings for a few iOS versions now:
To try and make my phone less interesting so I spend less time on it, I also use Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Colour Filters > Greyscale with Intensity turned up to max so it's black and white. If you set Settings > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut to Colour Filters you can toggle this with a triple slick of the side button, in case you want to show someone a photo or something.The trouble with Reduce Transparency on iOS 26 is that it also reduces contrast (irrespective of Increase Contrast).
Further, "Increase Contrast" turns some CarPlay buttons to have white text on light-cyan backgrounds.
That's absolutely wild.
Sounds like a bug. Probably worth reporting it to get it fixed. Historically, Apple’s accessibility features have been best in class.
It’s not really a bug, it’s a side effect of the heavier blur resulting in more average colors for the backgrounds of UI controls, reducing contrast with the text and icons in the foreground. Instead of blurring whatever is behind the controls, they’d have to choose actual solid backgrounds for UI controls, but the whole Liquid Glass concept largely abandons that.
It's definitely a bug that high contrast no longer provides high contrast in the liquid glass setting. It doesn't matter if that is the logical outcome of a series of events and choices that were made to that point, it's a breaking change in behavior, therefore a bug.
Bugs aren't always NPEs. Business Logic bugs are still bugs.
There is no “high contrast”. Increase Contrast has roughly the same (limited) effects it always had (enhancing the presentation of specific UI controls in specific ways), hence it’s not broken. What I’m saying is that Reduce Transparency is reducing contrast in a way that is orthogonal to, and isn’t prevented by, also having Increase Contrast turned on.
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.
Reduce Transparency helps in some ways, but also introduces its own issues. A couple I noticed in the brief time I used it:
* 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.
I’ve recently been trying out the automations feature in the iOS shortcuts app to turn color filters off/on when opening/closing camera/photos/facetime so I can remove the triple click shortcut. It works well enough. Its disappointing but not surprising that in 2025 on an iPhone 15 pro this isn’t instant and takes a good half second for the color filters to turn off/on.
It works, but it looks even worse. Also the reduced transparency in many apps leads to a letterbox effect, which reduces the available space for content.
Can someone please make me understand why does searching for "Accessibility" in settings doesn't return any results? In fact, none of the search accessibility search terms work, like: "reduce", "transparency", "contrast", "motion".
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?
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.
I like it too. However, I have noticed several screens that clearly were never tested by any Apple testers. Not just the liquid glass part, either; I've found entirely borked screens inside of the iOS settings app.
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.
Just in case you aren't aware, you can swipe up from an existing tabs address bar and it'll show all open tabs UI
I did know that! But just seems harder to invoke after the update.
Thank you!
I'm a fan of the eye-candy. Truly feels like a glimpse of the future is terms of aesthetics. I just wish they hadn't thrown UX principles away.
I must be in the minority because I actually kinda like liquid glass. I find the effect tasteful.
I'm newer to iOS (first iPhone was 15 pro) and macOS (M2 Air) so have tried to keep an open mind - only excessively irritating bugs will get me back to android and windows, as the back and forth transition is a soft barrier.
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.
If you head into Safari's settings you can reinstate the old bottom bar (or the even older top and bottom bars)
There’s also a hell of a lot of gestures that I’ve just learned of: https://www.cnet.com/tech/i-finally-got-used-to-the-new-ios-...
> (Admittedly I don't have any accessibility issues which may come up for others)
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.
>It is insane to put everyone over about 50 into an accessibility category
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.
Indeed.
Turning on reduce transparency makes it perfectly usable, generally.
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.
Came her to say this. There are things I still don't like about it, but reducing transparency has helped a lot. The rest I'm willing to live with (as if I had any choice...)
I came here to look for this comment. I like it as well.
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 think there are a few nice changes in 26, but they’re small things.
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.
Yeah it grew on me over the beta phase, now when I hold an iPhone not updated it feels old and I really don’t like previous versions. Regardless of places where it’s not ideal implementations yet, I can’t see myself coming back to the previous style. Liquid Glass will get better and I really like it. I got wow moments sometimes when it shines on some occasions
I think the idea of a new design of some sort was a good one. We’ve been in the same world since iOS 7, 12 years ago.
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 completely agree with you. And sometimes depending on the content it’s unreadable that’s for sure. But they must have an endgame. Maybe they get us used to the UI, users will complain and in 6 months will get used to it and in a year it’s forgotten & updated. Because if they have a new paradigm then it’s easier for them if people are already used to the UX I guess ?
I guess that’s my problem. At this point I don’t trust that they DO have an endgame. I think this WAS it and they just ignored all the problems.
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.
I agree, from all the directions to make their UX foundation evolve that’s the weirdest one. If they don’t have anything else that make sense for it all then it’s the start of the decline for them I guess. I hate android UX, I tried and I hate it, Samsung is the worst for me.
Settings -> Accessibility -> Display & Text Size -> enable Reduce Transparency
That made a world of difference for me.
I tried that, but this completely removes the transparency, and some apps look even worse and harder to visualise as it’s not designed to not have the transparency on iOS 26.
This could be significant improvement if Apple let us choose the transparency percentage.
It makes some things better. But it also replaces transparency in some apps with just a solid block of colour. Photos you lose like 10-20% of the screen. The UI used to fit and work well and they just broke it. Maddening.
I did this on all my Apple devices about 60 seconds after the update. I don't know how people can use things like iMessage with the defaults.
It’s garbage. I’m done.
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.
I certainly won't be upgrading to this version. I already don't really like the current version and see no reason to inflict a Windows Vista-like experience on myself.
Agreed, it’s pretty bad. It causes my 16 pro max to lag in some apps, Siri is broken, etc. Very surprised this made it through QA to GA.
Any specific apps? I'm not having performance issues on an iPhone SE 3, which should be a lot less powerful, but perhaps I haven't bumped into them. Or maybe apps use different resources on a less powerful phone?
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.
Re: performance, I disabled Apple Intelligence (it’s useless anyways) and noticed a big perf improvement on my 16 plus.
Appreciate the suggestion, unfortunately, I have it off already :(
Is it even possible?
It was, but Apple is no longer signing the old releases. (https://ipsw.me/iPhone14,4).
I downgraded about 10 minutes after trying iOS 26. Sorry to all who missed the window.
Wow, didn’t know that. Really ticks me off.
I'm still on 17.7.2, hoping for a jailbreak one day...
You can still upgrade to 18 using delayed OTA (which extends the deadline by up to 90 days): https://dhinakg.github.io/delayed-otas.html
It’s only when you’re already on iOS 26 that you can’t downgrade anymore.
Only for a very limited time after the release. And you can’t strictly “downgrade“ it, you have to restore it from factory with the older OS and then reload your back up.
Then you would be forced to upgrade after factory reset (basically digital sisyphus)?
No, you can go back for a while. They’ll certainly ask you, but you can say no.
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.
Apple is pretty good in not forcing upgrades as far as I remember. You can stay on an older OS until you personally run into app compatibility issues
They’re getting bolder about pushing you to upgrade with badges on settings and push notifications and defaulting people into automatic updates.
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.
Even with updates turned off I get nagging notification in the messaging app and on the lock screen as well as the appstore. Still on 17.7.2.
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.
I made the mistake of upgrading (13 Mini) and it is very clear that the new UI was not tested at all on smaller screens. The rounded buttons take up so much extra margin that actual usable space is greatly diminished.
How's the battery on your 13 Mini? Mine is abhorrent compared to a few weeks ago.
Same here - on a 12 Mini. My wife and my mother have the same phone, and I have recommended that they hold back on upgrading.
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 have a 12 mini and have also found that 26 has killed my battery life.
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 have the standard iPhone 13 (not mini) and the battery longevity is probably the best of any phone I've ever owned. At over 3.5 years old it still reports 89% battery health and lasts much longer than I need. Previous iPhones I owned were all pretty much on their last legs by that age.
I haven't upgraded it to iOS 26 / Liquid Glass, though, and given what I'm seeing/hearing, I don't plan to.
The question was how much the update to iOS 26 affected battery life
On the iPhone 13 Mini
I like to rant about my iPhone 13's great battery, any chance I can get!
U+1FAE1 SALUTING FACE
I just replaced it before the 26 upgrade. It was at 76% by then. With the new battery, I haven’t faced any issues. It lasts a whole day easily, unless I do things like tethering etc.
Replied at the same time as you. I agree. In Safari there’s ton of space on each side of the URL bubble yet I only get about 7 chara visible.
There is a Safari setting to improve this, although it adds height. Still preferable, imo.
The mini’s logical resolution is actually the same as the Pro Max with Display Zoom, hence the latter will have the same issue.
Same. Terrible mistake. My mini overheats like crazy now.
On the mini, some UI elements got half pushed into Narnia. Apple, like, WTF?!
I regret upgrading my 13 Mini so much. Performance is terrible and it's chugging power.
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.
I have an iphone 13 pro max. On many screens, the UI now stutters when it was smooth before. I have a very strong dislike for the new transparency changes. It absolutely makes things harder to read. And it comes at a cost of making the UI stutter. For example I just scrolled down the notifications, they are all a little harder to read because the the phone is trying to show the background through the notification area?
Why would anybody want that?
For what it’s worth, I upgraded to 26 on a 3rd gen SE and perf is totally fine. I do hate most of the UI changes though. I really hope they do a dot release that lets me turn off the “safari viewport is big but we draw crap on top of it” stuff. I keep cursing at the title bar and url bar obscuring important things.
Performance is fine on my SE 3rd gen as well
It's functionally tolerable when you disable transparency and increase contrast in accessibility settings.
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.
It was running well on my 13 pro as in there was no lag on anything, but I can’t speak for battery life. It was bad before and it was still bad after, but maybe it got worse?
iOS .0 releases tend to be this way, even on brand new devices. I noticed some big perf improvements on the 26.0.1 release. If I were you I'd wait til 26.1 or 26.2 and reassess then. It still may not be optimal for a mini tho for non-perf reasons, as iOS26 assumes a larger average device size.
I have an iPhone 13 and haven’t noticed. Don’t love it though.
The safari changes are the worst part.
Upgraded my 12 mini. Performance is fine. Battery life is as it always was
On iPhone 12 mini, the battery life is incredibly worse. I was charging once a day, 30 → 70% usually, and now I’m charging all the time I have a chance. I’m not very active user, but each session of screen time reduces the battery significantly. Before that I felt that despite the small battery, the device works forever. Now, I’m back into my iPhone 4S times, when I upgraded to iOS 7.
Well I guess I'm not updating my iPhone 11 then!
Same here, iOS 18 already felt a bit sluggish compared to 17, but sadly Apple stopped signing 17 some days before I discovered you can downgrade.
26 is definitely not for older devices. Heck, 26 is probably not for any device, this article makes UX look like crap.
It has horrible battery life, even on a relatively new device. Don’t upgrade.
This is the worst part of it.
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.
I run these commands when I boot my M1 Pro Macbook. It greatly improved general usability:
#!/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.
I just think that Apple should go down to biannual phone updates and major OS versions. I really don’t understand the urgency behind forcing this kind of velocity for such a mature system. It seems perpetually rushed.
I have a 12 mini and it works well.
IMO, this is 99% typical "not what I'm used to" internet rage. Upgrade and enjoy.
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.
Oh wow, a statement like this coming from a blog entry about creating windows 8?? Maybe it has to do with that I‘m Gen Z but I absolutely love Frutiger Aero. It never looked cheesy, first it was modern then it was nostalgic. All meanwhile I still have trauma from the hideous Metro tiles.
I'm also gen Z. For me the reaction to Windows Aero was similar, but I guess that's just how it is because it's what we grew up with. The blog post is talking about imitating materials in general though, and I can totally see how it can be taken too far. Think putting wood PNGs as backgrounds for app elements or adding brushed aluminium textures on sliders, things like those look pretty dated to me now. I'm guessing the Microsoft designers just had a far lower tolerance for that stuff, since IMO Windows 7 was very tame in terms of this - it felt just abstractly transparent and shiny more than skeuomorphic.
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.
> Think putting wood PNGs as backgrounds for app elements or adding brushed aluminium textures on sliders, things like those look pretty dated to me now.
This was a late 90s/early 2000s thing. I remember it on some Win98 and XP applications.
Nah, it persisted in many places, in some to lesser extents than others. It feels like in the 90s it was more of a "look, we can make UIs so flashy now!" thing, which then morphed into an actual design philosophy. See for example the Apple Newsstand app from iOS 6 [0] or lots of VST plugins from any time period, even up to today [1]
[0] https://i.redd.it/9fhcm9ce0ao21.jpg
[1] https://klanghelm.com/assets/img/VUMT/VUMT-2-solo-full.jpg
Must be a Gen Z meme because it was traumatic for those that lived it. It reminds me of Windows Vista and, my god, the first few years of KDE 4 - it has taken me until last year to try KDE again (and finally it has shed it’s silly hard contrast black transparency phase)
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.
I have to agree. Windows Aero is a visual mess, especially on Vista, and many of the comparable UXes of the time were not much better. Apple's Aqua UI was the best of the bunch, and it still looked like a child's toy.
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.
Aero was kind of a mess in Vista, but improved substantially in 7 (and a lot of that was due to more frosted glass look / less transparency). I would still rate 7 as the best balance of usability and eye candy that Windows has ever had, and I've used all of them heavily starting with Win 3.1.
Nice find! Thanks for sharing.
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.
Yes making everything skeuomorphic is the ultimate finger in Ivy’s eye for no apparent reason other than it was very different and got some designers promoted. They had to answer the “iOS isn’t changing a lot” with something so they went with the dumbest regression ever.
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.
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.
The amount of obvious visual flaws is crazy. On an iPhone, play a video in Picture-in-Picture then hide it off the edge of the screen. The corner radius of the arrow control and the video underneath it are different so you can see the video poking through
> But there's no way to tone down the new animations
Does Reduce Motion (under Accessibility) not work? I haven't updated to 26 yet, and probably won't for a while.
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 agree. I think that the criticisms on legibility are extremely biased. In my experience, the real issues with Liquid Glass are in terms of decreased usable space, less discoverability of actions that were previously top-level, and most importantly (and rather objectively), battery life.
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.
How is criticizing legibility of text-on-text "extremely biased"? This is basic UX.
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.
decreased usable space is definitely my biggest gripe, especially on Tahoe.
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).
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.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the Liquid Glass redesign was something they had to push out the door to distract from the absolute trainwreck that is Apple Intelligence.
Don’t look at that trainwreck! Here’s a different one!
> 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.
I work at a FAANG (but not Apple) -- your characterization is accurate, and I think it's important to not "shoot the messenger" here. The team of UX+SWEs probably made valiant efforts to reify some "vision" from a higher-up who cannot be contradicted.
It reminds me of Visual Studio 2012, back when some higher ups decided that the way to "align" with Windows 8 and its Metro design language was to switch the main menu to use ALL CAPS.
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.
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.
A few years ago, I’d install all iOS major updates practically as soon as they came out.
Nowadays I feel that the quality of iOS has slipped, so will wait for 26.1 first.
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.
Indeed. Not good.
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.
Liquid Glass looks and feels like early 2000’s WinAmp Skin Generator skins.
I think that would be considered a huge compliment in the "Gen-Z designer" scene that many of Apple's designers probably inhabit.
except it doesn't whip the llama's ass
What does, these days?
Audacious in WinAmp skin mode.
https://getwacup.com/
https://webamp.org
It WIPs it.
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.
If you head over to digital artistry-related subreddits / other forums, they are almost uniformly very strongly against this due to the major UX regressions in iPadOS for their typical use cases (i.e. touch-based multitasking having been ruined)
But yes agreed, it is mind-boggling to me how broadly well-received this has been
It's crazy that they removed split view and slide over from the iPad. The new window management is still extremely fiddly. It takes now 7 steps to open another app next to the current one, and a few more steps to get them all full screen again.
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 new windowing system is actually rather decent when used with a keyboard + all window tiling / maximising / app switching keyboard shortcuts memorised. Although the lack of Slide Over is still inexplicable and sucks.
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...
It looks so easy on the video. If I try to drag a full screen window it only works in 20% of the cases. In the other cases either one of those things happen: menu bar opens, widgets opens, control center opens, lock screen opens, or I tap some controls in the app.
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.
I completely agree and I just put in the bit about the keyboard shortcuts to pre-empt comments from the minority of iPad users who never remove the iPad from their Magic Keyboard saying they quite like the update.
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.
Yeah some niches are complaining, but mainstream content seems to be positive to neutral. I understand that people like MKBHD can't badmouth such a big player without risking loss of access, but not even clickbait content creators seem to be aware that the king has no clothes.
> I see extreme issues and regressions literally everywhere
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.
.0 releases tend to have certain bugs, but not to this degree.
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.
Are you talking about bugs to mean broken functionality or design you dislike? I’m not sure I noticed broken functionality anywhere
Aesthetic glitches are everywhere, though it’s hard to tell when behavior is intended. Can you read the context of my texts? https://ibb.co/mVbVpYCD
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.
Oh I know that UI, it’s when you slide the notification center from the top. That’s a conscious action with an animation so yes the context of modality is understandable there.
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 keep reading about all the memory leaks and have been staying far away. Lots of people reporting slowdowns and crashes and not being able to launch new apps. That just shows really bad QA across not just one app or the OS but across the whole process. Probably the hurry to get out a new OS version every year instead of every couple
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
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5856398
I'm not surprised since I think most UI overhauls replace one system with another that is roughly equally good, except that nobody is familiar with the new system so everyone burns a bunch of time and attention learning the new one just to get back to par. The new UI often isn't worse in any objective sense, it's just not better and the whole exercise is a giant waste of everyone's time.
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.
I think a lot of the time the UI is objectively worse. Less functionality, more clicks/swipes to do the same actions, less legibility, etc.
It's just that people get used to bad software.
> 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.
It rarely improves above and beyond the level from which it had plummeted, though. More often you get tweaks to reduce the major annoyances to tolerable level. Which users then tolerate because, well, what other choice do they have when literally everyone is doing it?
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.
The transition with iOS 7 was a usability downgrade, and iOS 26 is now another usability downgrade. That people are complaining about both of them is perfectly justified.
Just because something happened once before doesn't mean that it's good.
Actually about half of the top comments there are positive. Opinion was clearly divided. Not now though!
Do you think that this thread is representative of Apple’s user base?
Yea I’m tempted to upgrade because I assume that people just don’t like change. But then seeing nn group doesn’t like it isn’t a great sign. Definitively going to wait and see what people say in a few months.
To be fair, the article on the NN site has a top banner with current section which occupies at least a third of a screen and makes it not very pleasant to read on the iphone.
I don’t understand why usability experts’ website has worse experience than 90% of the web?
Hey, but the release of iOS 7 was the worst release in the entire history of iOS releases. At least my personal impression is so. This release completes with that. So I agree, sure thing, we can substitute iOS 7 for iOS 26, and it would be the same. But what’s the sameness we discuss? Is it some corporate culture that inevitably brings us the mediocrity, or us, the users, being thankless plebes with some weird wishes of usability? To me, that’s the first, obviously. You leave them alone for a while and they’ll bring you … this.
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...
You can actually swipe up from the search field at the bottom and that will show all tabs. (If anyone is reading this from apple, that animation should be sped up).
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.
As a long time Android user, I find these magical gestures frustrating difficult to discover. How on earth is someone supposed to guess such a gesture exists, and how am I supposed to guess the rules for when certain gestures work and certain gestures don’t?
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?
You can also swipe left and right to switch tabs, in any state.
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.
So many changes over the years and some of them might actually be decent but I wouldn’t have known about this had I not read this comment or accidentally triggered it in the future. Has Apple experimented with “micro” tutorials that can pop up if they detect the user is performing an action in an inefficient/deprecated pattern? I.e. if in Safari I navigate to all tabs by tapping at the bottom —> hamburger icon —> all tabs a one time modal pops up showing the ux pattern they recommend
I hate micro tutorials so much, I really don't like when things have an invisible language that you have to just know to be able to use them.
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"
There's a "Tips" app that comes with iOS that covers big changes, like home screen navigation, and some default app changes, like Photos app.
Safari isn't in there, but that would be the place to put it.
Just because it took me a second to figure out: swiping left or right works when done on the search bar, not anywhere on the screen
Swiping left or right on the screen is the special “please misinterpret my attempt to scroll as a ‘forward’ or ‘back’ command, eliciting a curse” gesture. I have searched for a way to disable this many times.
That swipe sucks because it’s almost identical to the “swipe up from bottom” home screen swipe. You have to be precise, and the initial UI feedback looks very similar between the two.
I gave up on the swipe for the same reason, but if you double tap the triple dot menu it hits the 'all tabs' thing.
> Luckily, Apple is ok at supporting older phones, so I just have to be careful to not accidentally upgrade my SE to iOS 26.
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.
Safari and the lock screen clock were my biggest issues.
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.
Oh, so it’s hidden? I gave up several times without realizing. That is incredibly stupid
Just swipe up from the address bar.
thank you!
> Too often, however, the computer acts and the user merely reacts within a limited set of options. In other instances, the computer “takes care” of the user, offering only those alternatives that are judged “good” for the user or that “protect” the user from having to make detailed decisions. This approach mistakenly puts the computer, not the user, in control.
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.
I was thinking of changing my iOS browser because of the safari tab change.
I initially balked at this change but realized they placed the 'all tabs' button right where the ellipsis menu is, so you can just double tap to get to your tabs. Takes the same amount of time.
Pinch gesture works as well.
>Fortunately, the software capability to handle different text sizes can make it easier to support people with a vision disability. You can design your software with a “zoom” feature that increases the size of characters or graphics on the screen.
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.
You can just set it to show the tab button
Why isn’t the better option the default?
Regrettably, humans come along and need to prove themselves, so here we are. Being human: it's a feature, not a bug. (shrugs)
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.
I imagine it's a lot easier to show you're developing code by redesigning things than it is to do the work to figure out fixes to harder bugs with unclear tradeoffs or work to create new directions for the company. New UI is just exciting enough to fool some people into thinking it's still fresh.
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).
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.
I'm also pushing the upgrade of my Xs year after year now. It runs fine on iOS 18, and it still gets security updates (the newer models didn't get 18.7).
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.
> You saved me so much money because I won’t buy another Apple product.
Same. iOS 26 and Tahoe completely rule out me purchasing. I cannot believe this shipped.
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 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.
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.
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.
> Why do I need to see behind quick settings to adjust brightness?
It totally boggles my mind that somebody thought this was good idea.
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.
I just booted up my G4 Cube running 10.2 and lemme tell you that aquagel looks 10x better, especially on at 1600x1200 on a Trinitron. Gorgeous, fun, clear delineation of content, with just maybe a bit too much transparency in a few spots.
It went too far (I think the subdued Aqua of 10.9 was peak), but no where near as bad as Glarse.
Do they actually like it or do they like that it’s new?
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.
It’s not actually unified though, it’s quite different between the various OSs. The argument is really bunk.
If you want an example of well-designed UX that is conceptually about "making everything the same", that would be Metro (of Windows Phone fame).
Liquid Glass is genuinely objectively atrocious on multiple metrics like text readability.
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.
You literally just need to pull the notification drawer down to see how horrible Liquid Glass is. You know, one of the most common gestures on any smartphone today.
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.
FWIW on my phone I don't have a problem with it at all, probably because it doesn't run into the same performance limitations.
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.
Interesting, it seems just as smooth on my OnePlus 13. As an app developer I don't see how the Material 3 Expressive UI would cause reduced performance. My only guess is poor usage of the API by developers.
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.
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 don't like how everything seems to require extra clicks or has extra animation now. For example, the workout selection has a weird feeling like it's fluid and everything just kind of scrolls along. Then when you stop on something long enough, the rest of the UI elements like the start / play button show up.
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.
Interestingly the animation when an app is opened has actually been sped up in iOS 26!
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.
The really pathetic thing about this... Linux has had the capability to do this for years. About 20 years ago, I was playing with compiz, and turned on every single effect. Window dragging with transparency, bubbly windows that would snap into place, windows that would resize with an elastic-looking snap, switching entire desktops with cube animations. Animations were smooth and fluid, and didn't even drop a frame. That was 20 years ago, running on really low end Intel integrated graphics. There's no excuse for this laggyness. These are basic animations that GPUs should handle just fine. I mean hell, we were rendering full 3d environments with realistic water effects like 10+ years ago on GPUs that can't even begin to compare with what we have today. Your GPU can't even handle a tiny little animated button today? WTF?
I have a Series 10 and I haven't experienced either of those problems. Other than the PIN entry screen being very "glassy", it's not actually that different. Perhaps you have some other issue.
From the home screen scroll down through the widgets with the digital crown and you’ll see what I mean.
I don't have a problem with this either, it's as smooth as it was before the Liquid Glass update.
No, I don't see a problem. Scrolls smoothly, no loading delays. Perhaps it is a specific widget you have?
I doubt the bulk of battery life is lost in visual effects, especially if turning them off apparently does not help.
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.
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.
There's a whole video of the Apple team doing it. Absolutely bonkers. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-introduces-a-de...
Imagine the UI we’d have if somebody gave them jellybeans instead.
“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.
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.
Fun, I actually preferred the circle. I loved the shape changing into the element it was hovering; I miss that a lot.
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
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..
I quite like it and I think iOS 26 largely works really well. But MacOS 26 has been quite buggy for me, it seems to have gotten better with the latest patch but I’m still seeing semi regular issues.
No you aren't, I like it too. I did notice some slowdown with my iPhone 14 in low battery mode though, which is a shame but not unexpected.
Been using Liquid Glass since the first developer beta release, as an Apple dev I like it.
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.
Oh, so OP is holding it wrong?
Fo sure, no sane person has a grass as their chat background or any background. That seems silly.
I've been using a grass wallpaper and lock screen on all my devices for something like 15 years now. It works great if you don't go out of your way to break it and then blame the user.
This is one of my "boomer" opinions.
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 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.
This intended effect is clearly not achieved when the final result looks busier, animates and shines to rob attention from the content and reduces visibility.
I don't agree with that assessment.
If the UI is floating on top of my content it’s literally in the fucking way of my content. It does the *opposite* of getting out of the way!!
If this is how you're going to build your web UIs going forward, take note from Apple here - add an A11Y mode. These changes exclusively harm the overall contrast of the UI and it's unfair to expect visually impaired users to deal with your visual clutter for the sake of r/unixporn eye candy.
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.
Yeah reduced motion would probably toggle opaque backgrounds as well. But you can't really get that glass shader with css anyways so I imagine there wouldn't be many transparent effects, it's more just the layout I'm talking about for web.
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...
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.
This seems like a minority perspective, but while (or maybe because) I was really prepared to hate Liquid Glass, I actually quite like it, all in all.
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.
It definitely feels like they needed something, anything, to use as a marketing tool following the Apple Intelligence false advertising debacle.
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.
I did the same on Tahoe and now the formerly glass buttons are grey with a weird blue shadow in the upper left. One example: the sound slider on the menu bar. With all the GFX turned on, it is a transparent blob, with the reduced settings, it's just a weird gray with a nonsensical shadow.
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.
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?
much cheaper to maintain only a version or two across the board and drop support over time as devices get too old to handle the new bells and whistles
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.
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.
It looks worse in screenshots than it does to use. I saw a few images on reddit that looked quite bad, but then when I actually used it I saw those screenshots were taken in the middle of animations or transitions that last only a handful of frames.
Indeed, it's telling that the first screenshot they are using to illustrate the problem is a iMessage screenshot, with a high contrast background image, only one message and images in a similar color theme as the background image.
If you want high contrast in your messages app...don't use a high contrast background image?
That picture just feels like a case study in why Apple drug their feet on features like that for so long. If you let people set a background and change the font, you're going to have unreadable purple comic sans over kittens within minutes.
On my iphone 13 pro max when I pull down the notification drawers, the list stutters heavily, every single time. I am assuming this is because the phone is trying to animate things while keeping the notifications semi-transparent. Why do I need to see what is behind the notifications? Transparency on such commonly used functions are not just unnecessary, they add negative value. Add to that the stutters that did not exist before and you have the making of a frustrating experience.
Why would anybody want this?
I agree. I don't like change and I'm usually the first to criticise, but it's fine. Some of the animations feel nice, but I'm yet to see anything that wows or upsets me.
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.
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.
Yeah interesting, I had the same experience, seems fine on iOS for me using since early beta, have not updated my desktop to Tahoe yet.
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.
I have an Android phone from samsung.. they send ads on the default Google Messages app, and due to some rich text formatting unlike a regular SMS it takes space in my notifications menu.
Who is "they"?
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.
Apple will probably end up doing the same eventually.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess that's one good thing about being blind, nothing's really changed much for us.
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!
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.
Hopefully Apple will change its decision on Liquid Glass not too long like that butterfly keyboard.
Unfortunately that took from 2016 to about 2019... and then they kept selling butterfly models for a long time after that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wrote about this not long ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45509922
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.
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.
“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?)
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).
> 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.
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.
Liquid ass.
That's a different product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Ass
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.
If anyone here from apple is reading, does the leadership even aware of this problem?
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.
Remember that iOS 18 was over a decade of evolution on the design changes in iOS 7, which also had a significant amount of hate when it was released for being ugly, confusing, and hard to read.
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.
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.
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.
The only sane desktop UX is on Linux/BSD these days.
The problem, of course, is 1) apps and 2) things like hardware support and battery life.
More like “how do we shovel the UX of a very niche, overpriced product that barely anyone will use (Vision Pro) on everyone that uses a recent-ish Apple product?”
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.
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.
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.
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
In the default “compact” layout, I can open a new tab in two taps by tapping the 3 dots, tap “New tab” from the menu.
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.
For iOS, if you swipe up on the url bar, it shows all your tabs and then you hit the new tab (+) on the bottom left of the screen.
You do have to discover that faster way to do it, and the alternative is three taps.
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?
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.
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.
Certainly neither is true for everyone. I don't notice any difference in my iPhone's life or performance.
I really hope they undo these changes. Hate it and there's no easy way to switch back to iOS 18.
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?
Tests I've seen weirdly seem to show higher battery consumption when using "reduce transparency"
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)
I remember adding translucent effects to my KDB desktop environment installation in 2008 and coming to the same conclusion
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?
Thank you for taking UX seriously and listening to your users.
FWIW, these days, I would gladly pay extra for that.
iOS 26 is really bad. The only update I can remember disliking was iOS 7, but 26 is certainly worse.
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.
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.
Some been saying its liquid ass
Cracked as in good or bad
Yeah, that's the funny thing about this article title.
Apparently the author (and most commenters here!) do not realize "cracked" is VERY popular gen z slang for being very good at something.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cracked
Cracked as in they cooked[1] hard.
1. http://cooked.urbanup.com/14439505
no, that's using it wrong.
- "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
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOpadGhGtuA
Goodn't
Bad, like really bad. Example: “Liquid design is really bad ass”
That sounds good
He's being sarcastic, "bad" and "bad ass" are clearly opposites.
I definitely agree. Something about it just seems off.
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.
> 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.
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.
Made my phone immediately much laggier (iPhone 13 Pro) which is probably the intention
13 Mini here, and yesterday for the first time since I bought, the battery died on me in the middle of the day, in the office, with my regular usage (which is very low).
Every update slows your phone down temporarily, because there’s background processing that goes on for a while after. That’s always been the case
I’ve had it for days and it’s still slow
It also made my iPhone 16 Pro Max a bit laggier, but the worst offender is my Apple Watch Series 10 which has a big frame rate drop every time there is a Liquid Glass animation. It feels very sluggish now and the battery seems worse than before. Everyone is impacted to different extents, I don’t think it’s deliberately made to cripple older iPhones.
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.
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.
Yeah it's so un-Apple like it's really jarring.
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.
> It feels like Apple is having a Windows moment with their operating systems
.. or by definition, Apple is having an Apple moment :)
> 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.
> 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.
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
I know I'm old and grumpy but it's hard to think of anything I want less from my computer and my stupid phone than "fun and freshness."
I love everything about the new design
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.
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.
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.
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)
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."
https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html
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
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.
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
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.
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
iOS 7 “UIApocalypse” all over again.
Liquid Glass has a few bugs to iron out but as a whole is quite good.
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.
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.
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.
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.
liquid glass is dumb. i've no idea what's going on at apple, but it makes zero sense.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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 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.
> The basics of visual design are made up qualitative guidelines with no solid metrics to back it up.
> 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?
In short: Dear Apple, please tone it down a few notches.
Am I the only one who feels like this doesn’t even look good, even if it was a better user experience?
No, I wish we'd go back to the skeuomorphic iOS 6 (and below) look.
Honestly, this article is overblown. It works just fine for me and I don't have any major issues.
Yeah, it sucks. Roll it back, Apple. Roll it back.
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.
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.
It’s annoying
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.