There was also an article in Wired about this and I'll just say this: the fact the most discussed thing about the new iOS version is how to make their terrible new UI (that no one asked for) off is telling something about the state of innovation at Apple. It's annoying to see apps adapt to the new design, making a lot of the navigation in the top and the bottom worse (and great to see a couple of holdouts like Bluesky). A design philosophy where the full width of the screen is used is pretty good, not sure we needed Apple to prove it with a counter example.
Can't wait for them to release iOS 27 and announce they've made a useable UI again. "Hey friends, those accessibility settings you've used for a year? You don't need them anymore. Apple is where innovation happens!!"
> I'll just say this: the fact the most discussed thing about the new iOS version is how to make their terrible new UI (that no one asked for) off is telling something about the state of innovation at Apple.
I observed that too. Polled a few people I know who upgraded and they all have the same impression that they'd rather turn it off. I shared the accessibility settings with some to help them out. I haven't upgraded my main phone might have to wait a while longer.
This has to be resume driven. I presume designers at Apple have to end the year with a review to justify their salaries. "So Bob, what would you say you do here?". The answer "Well not much, we designed things nicely already, and now we're just chilling, listening to podcasts and having 2 hour lunches" is not going to fly. They want to say something like "That flashy glass thing, we did that!". Except, in this case I wish they'd all just be chilling and having 2 hour long lunches, instead of messing with the interface since they apparently managed to make things worse.
There are a lot of Apple employees here that are going to downvote this but I cannot turn a blind eye to this abomination.
I’ve been an early adapter since my first iPhone in 2009. But the new UI is plain ugly, lacking general accessibility, and full of bugs to the point that it’s just user hostile at this point.
They broke almost all of their design guidelines and make everything useless bubbles, I just cannot believe that Apple released this ugly thing to billions of devices.
A lot of these UI bugs are also of the kind where once I notice them, I can no longer un-notice them. The border around the Home Screen icons being one. When you swipe up from bottom to go back to Home Screen, the app icon doesn't initially have border while the animation is ongoing. Once the animation finishes, the border suddenly shows up. Once I noticed this, it's been annoying me everytime I swipe to go back.
I thought the latest dev beta of iOS would fix this but it's still here.
Exactly. It’s especially bothering because the previous version had a lot of thought put into it, macOS specifically would allow you to drag a file onto terminal to get its path etc. such small but incredibly powerful things all around. It’s the thought behind the design and its consistency that matters.
Instead now we have a phone operating system UI posing as macOS. There’s no proper text alignment, padding, or good margins. It’s just not elegant at all, it feels like a knockoff.
The other day, the keyboard stopped showing up in Safari, I was getting an empty keyboard tray when I click into a text input. How in the frozen hell are they able to achieve this level of incompetence. What’s the goal of this, just extract money from people and enshitify everything. I’m just so tied of macOS at this point that I started enjoying my work computer which is Windows 11.
“We’ve heard a lot of feedback about the incredible design changes we made in iOS 27. In order to meet the challenges set out by our users, we invented a new type of glass that is both transparent and opaque… at the same time! Physically impossible, you say? Not at Apple.”
There is switchable glass that can change between transparent and opaque. It’s used for some car sunroofs and various other applications. While it’s not “at the same time”, as a theme idea for the OS that has analogs in the physical world, it could be done.
I truly, genuinely wanted to like Liquid Glass. I think the default reaction to ANY change in UX, even changes that are generally improvements, is: "I don't like this, it's different!"
I thought that'd be the case for ios 26. But after installing it... yeesh. I can barely see anything. It's just awful.
Overall I don't mind Liquid Glass. I really just want to turn off the borders around the Home Screen app icons. They look okay for white background but very ugly with black or dark background. It looks too chaotic.
If you develop apps, you can add this into your Info.plist file[0]. It turns off LG. Apple says that it's "temporary," but I think they'd be insane to start ignoring it.
Yeah, that would suck. The designer I'm working with, is already projectile-vomiting over LG. I think he'd quit, if I insisted that he help me to transition to it (we're a volunteer team).
I'm hoping that some of the senior management will realize what a clusterf**k this is, and let it stay (they still support ObjC apps, and I will bet that lots of AAA apps can't be easily converted to LG).
The thing that we have to keep in mind, is that some very "strong-willed" folks have staked their egos on LG, and will choose it as their hill to die on. We've seen that happen in many other instances (not just at Apple).
These settings are only half interesting. In iOS it's not bad, but on desktop there's really no actually usable set of configuration parameters that result in a sane experience across the board.
It is amazing how much time and effort must have gone into developing this liquid glass and rolling it out across products and platforms, all for a worse outcome in the end.
Is looking at notifications from the notification centre on iPhone while it's halfway down a common use case?
I see many critics of Liquid Glass (for iPhone, anyway) use the notification centre half down as an example of how bad Liquid Glass is, but it's way more legible when it's completely down and the background tints significantly.
I personally wouldn't rely on the `defaults write -g com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES` preference working for more than another OS release or two. Seems like a temporary stopgap to give third-party developers time to upgrade their apps, not a permanent way to disable Liquid Glass.
Heh funny, I was wondering why after the Tahoe update I wasn't noticing much of a difference and wondered why everybody was complaining about the glass effects - turns out I had checked the 'Accessibility => Display => Reduce Transparency' checkbox already in some earlier update for reasons I forgot.
FYI: The iOS 26.1 beta has an improved Accessibility setting: It replaces Button Shapes with Add Borders, which gives everything a really nice Classic Mac OS look with black lines around grey containers. Helps a lot.
I'd be willing to bet it's more likely entrenched leadership that needs to be replaced. All of the 10x engineers in the world can't fix a bad vision forced on them.
I'm assuming it's because nobody can just leave something alone. It's always gotta change, it's always gotta be made "better". And it probably generates a lot of marketing, good or bad.
If they leave it alone on what else would they be working on? Not on something in somebody's else department so it's either being layed off or convince the board that each year's iteration on the same things is the next groundbreaking invention.
You're describing the classical dichotomy between progressives and conservatives, a dichotomy which extends far beyond the political sphere to which is usually is applied. Whether it is in the arts, in architecture, in engineering, in design or in software development. UI design in particular seems to attract the type of person who is among the first to pull down Chesterton's fence [1] with no though given about what might be lost by this action.
A lot of design in the early era of UIs (until sometime mid-~90s~ Edit:: mid-2000s) was based on a lot of research. From academic research to ergonomics to plain old user research. They wouldn't always get it right, but they were learning.
Modern designers wouldn't understand what a book is if one hit them in the face. And their "research" is all vibes: "Quantified factors" are "32% increase in subculture perception", "a 34% boost in modernity" and "a 30% jump in rebelliousness" https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-goo...
[EDIT] I removed an extremely sarcastic comment. It was quite puerile.
I am a bit skeptical that they are "reaching for the best."
Once you start to hire and promote folks with a certain "corporate culture," they start hiring and promoting folks that fit that culture (and driving out ones that don't). I suspect that the problems actually started years ago, and now, those managers are hiring less-than-stellar SWEs, managers, and designers.
The thing about the really good people at Apple, is that they don't need to be subjected to an ugly corporate culture. They'll take their toys and go home (or to other companies), which is pretty much exactly what the less-than-stellar people want. The dichotomy of hiring high-Quality talent, is that they don't need to work for you, so you have to figure out ways to keep them. Often, money isn't the biggest driver. The good ones don't do it [just] for the money, and they'll always be able to make plenty, so, as their manager, you need to figure out what they really want.
Tbh. after the initial shock I got used to the macOS 26 UI. Seeing Finder in the new UI for the first time is a really interesting experience. But you get used to it. (And the sidebar-over-content style is kinda neat).
I'm currently in the process of adding support for the new UI to my macOS app. The biggest problem is to make it look good on the previous macOS version and on the new one. I still have more than 50% users on pre-glass.
I have an iPhone SE 2nd Generation. After a recent repair I was forced to upgrade to iOS 26.
My biggest gripe is the buggy keyboard. It shrinks a bit horizontally every time I open it. When using a mobile browser (I tested on a few), website footers and similar elements will get stuck above where the top of the keyboard would normally be, as if there was an invisible keyboard.
These tweaks to minimize the glass effect go a long way, such that I'm not as put off by the overall design as I was in its stock configuration.
Ventura got a security update last month. Sequoia will get updates for at least another 3 years. These glaring issues will get resolved eventually, even if it is the 'Frosted Glass' update.
I don't mind the liquid glass itself, but a lot of iOS and macOS seems badly designed when liquid glass is applied. Bright white default backgrounds with transparent panels on top featuring white titels. Misaligned screens for some reason. Unresponsive controls while they're animating. Safari introducing weird viewport bugs because it tries to be fancy with the address bar.
On iOS it feels unfinished, on macOS it feels unpolished. This has the potential to be pretty, or at least usable if you don't like the glass look, but someone needs to finish the process of porting to liquid glass.
exactly my thought. I never made it to Vista. In 2007 I changed WinXP (always used it with the classic grey theme) for OS X Tiger on a MacBook and never went back to Windows since then.
I wonder where a decent alternative will be lurking in the next few years? Apple is losing some grip, but all others are still worse overall.
Can't wait for them to release iOS 27 and announce they've made a useable UI again. "Hey friends, those accessibility settings you've used for a year? You don't need them anymore. Apple is where innovation happens!!"
I observed that too. Polled a few people I know who upgraded and they all have the same impression that they'd rather turn it off. I shared the accessibility settings with some to help them out. I haven't upgraded my main phone might have to wait a while longer.
This has to be resume driven. I presume designers at Apple have to end the year with a review to justify their salaries. "So Bob, what would you say you do here?". The answer "Well not much, we designed things nicely already, and now we're just chilling, listening to podcasts and having 2 hour lunches" is not going to fly. They want to say something like "That flashy glass thing, we did that!". Except, in this case I wish they'd all just be chilling and having 2 hour long lunches, instead of messing with the interface since they apparently managed to make things worse.
I’ve been an early adapter since my first iPhone in 2009. But the new UI is plain ugly, lacking general accessibility, and full of bugs to the point that it’s just user hostile at this point.
They broke almost all of their design guidelines and make everything useless bubbles, I just cannot believe that Apple released this ugly thing to billions of devices.
I thought the latest dev beta of iOS would fix this but it's still here.
Instead now we have a phone operating system UI posing as macOS. There’s no proper text alignment, padding, or good margins. It’s just not elegant at all, it feels like a knockoff.
The other day, the keyboard stopped showing up in Safari, I was getting an empty keyboard tray when I click into a text input. How in the frozen hell are they able to achieve this level of incompetence. What’s the goal of this, just extract money from people and enshitify everything. I’m just so tied of macOS at this point that I started enjoying my work computer which is Windows 11.
I thought that'd be the case for ios 26. But after installing it... yeesh. I can barely see anything. It's just awful.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/BundleResources/In...
The thing that we have to keep in mind, is that some very "strong-willed" folks have staked their egos on LG, and will choose it as their hill to die on. We've seen that happen in many other instances (not just at Apple).
It is amazing how much time and effort must have gone into developing this liquid glass and rolling it out across products and platforms, all for a worse outcome in the end.
I see many critics of Liquid Glass (for iPhone, anyway) use the notification centre half down as an example of how bad Liquid Glass is, but it's way more legible when it's completely down and the background tints significantly.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/w/chesterton-s-fence
Original Apple guidelines started with things like "Simplified Jungian Perception" on page 18 https://archive.org/details/apple-hig
Microsoft collected and analyzed hundreds of thousands of data points about their software. See "No Distaste for Paste" https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn...
Now?
Modern designers wouldn't understand what a book is if one hit them in the face. And their "research" is all vibes: "Quantified factors" are "32% increase in subculture perception", "a 34% boost in modernity" and "a 30% jump in rebelliousness" https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-goo...
I am a bit skeptical that they are "reaching for the best."
Once you start to hire and promote folks with a certain "corporate culture," they start hiring and promoting folks that fit that culture (and driving out ones that don't). I suspect that the problems actually started years ago, and now, those managers are hiring less-than-stellar SWEs, managers, and designers.
The thing about the really good people at Apple, is that they don't need to be subjected to an ugly corporate culture. They'll take their toys and go home (or to other companies), which is pretty much exactly what the less-than-stellar people want. The dichotomy of hiring high-Quality talent, is that they don't need to work for you, so you have to figure out ways to keep them. Often, money isn't the biggest driver. The good ones don't do it [just] for the money, and they'll always be able to make plenty, so, as their manager, you need to figure out what they really want.
I'm currently in the process of adding support for the new UI to my macOS app. The biggest problem is to make it look good on the previous macOS version and on the new one. I still have more than 50% users on pre-glass.
My biggest gripe is the buggy keyboard. It shrinks a bit horizontally every time I open it. When using a mobile browser (I tested on a few), website footers and similar elements will get stuck above where the top of the keyboard would normally be, as if there was an invisible keyboard.
These tweaks to minimize the glass effect go a long way, such that I'm not as put off by the overall design as I was in its stock configuration.
There's no winning with this release.
On iOS it feels unfinished, on macOS it feels unpolished. This has the potential to be pretty, or at least usable if you don't like the glass look, but someone needs to finish the process of porting to liquid glass.
I have more a problem with the menu structure then the glass effect.
> Looks Inside
> Long Article about how to turn of liquid glass
Well done Apple
XP is sort of like Fisher-Price for Windows, but is usable. Vista ... was something else.
I wonder where a decent alternative will be lurking in the next few years? Apple is losing some grip, but all others are still worse overall.
(get it?)