Comment by wilg 2 days ago
You will not think about liquid glass after a day, especially if you turn on the new options. There's no need for everyone here to contort themselves into not installing these updates. The new features in all the OS upgrades are very much worth it.
You're not going to add text message spam filtering to your phone because they changed the border radius or blur or whatever?
And I think everyone agrees that it is your choice to install IOS 26 on your phone.
Personally I will skip IOS 26 and stay on IOS 18 and maybe upgrade to IOS 27 when it comes out next year (if by then all the bad UI decisions have been reversed).
I had a play around with a friend's phone who was updated to IOS 26 and honestly It just doesnt work for me in it's current state.
I notice it all the damn time.
- If I scroll a web page, and then decide to close it, I have to wait 'til the browser finishes scrolling the page before it'll open the menu with the close button
- every single time I watch a video my eye is drawn to the fucking stupid glass-y diffraction patterns and away from the content I was watching, or the play/pause icon I was interacting with
- every single time I use the home screen on iOS, or CMD+tab in macOS, my eye is drawn to the glass-y highlights around the icons, distracting me from whatever I was trying to do and causing me to think about the OS (and how much I hate the new look)
- I keep noticing the stupidly wide rounded corners on apps
- I keep noticing how the glassy icons and controls and stuff don't consistently change color with dark/light mode. They sometimes change if the content behind them is light/dark (which you'd think is a contrast improvement but it wouldn't be necessary if they had boxed out the toolbars like before). Often half the buttons have changed to contrast with the background and half haven't. This makes all the icons harder to read because I have to interpret the whole set to work out why it's suddenly slightly confusing
- I keep noticing how the toolbar icons have this insane shadows making them appear about 5meters closer to my face than the rest of the scree, which pulls my attention away from whatever I was looking at
- I keep noticing how some icons have those annoying highlighted edges and some don't and wondering why that is, and if they'll all come in sync...
- ... and the glassy-highlighted icons look like shit because the highlights are all the same (same color, same angle, same spread around the edges of the icons), which wouldn't happen if they were actual physical things under natural illumination
- since iOS 26.2, the increase contrast and reduce transparency modes have got worse: they seriously mess with the colors, in many case the light/dark relationship is inverted from what would be most useful (I can't think of examples now - it was so annoying I actually switched back to glassy to allow my eye a sense of comfort when using the thing, and now I try to put up with the "eye candy" distractions instead). I used to have "increase contrast" turned on with the last several major iOS versions. The new scheme has made it slightly harder to use the phone.
And I'm not even getting to how everything is harder to read, harder to see. It's _dreadful_ and they should fire everyone from the C-level who signed it off downwards.
I definitely still notice the (inconsistent? Only occasional? Which makes it even worse) parts of my UI that now look like something from a circa 2001 Java (specifically—not flash, it’s the “cool” Java aesthetic of the time with its image blurring and filtering an such, not the differently-bad “cool” flash aesthetic) applet gfx-heavy web site menu.
Plus there’s the pile of outright visual bugs and glitches. Like my keyboard opening with one size, then after a moment resizing itself a few pixels narrower because it initially rendered a little too big and off center to the right, like a badly-designed webpage. Every single time I open it. Including to write and edit this comment.
I also notice that I had to turn a bunch of accessibility features on so I wouldn’t constantly see animations with tons of dropped frames making me feel like I’m playing a bad port of a 3D PlayStation 2 game on a Gameboy Advance.
On work devices I've been using iOS 26 since early betas and macOS 26 for a few weeks now, and I still think about the user experience degradation. On the bright side — it makes me appreciate iOS 18 and macOS 15 more.
At this point I'm not contorting myself into skipping an update; I'm looking at exiting the entire Apple ecosystem. I don't want Liquid Glass to be my computing experience for the next numerous years.
I installed iPadOS 26 specifically for the new windowing features. I like the glass look as a concept. But the actual implementation of it is total dogshit. I cannot go a day without seeing the OS render black-on-black or white-on-white text, especially in the status indicators at the top of the device. There are so many little things regarding automatic color contrast in UIKit that are just poorly thought out or broken.
The thing is, Liquid Glass is already using a shader to render the refraction effect on top of the other UI layers. But - at least from my own developer experiments - it doesn't actually use anything graphical to determine what background color it needs to contrast against[1]. Instead, it looks through the view hierarchy for a view on the same edge as the toolbar the widget is in, and then grabs some undocumented[0] property from that view to determine its background. This fails if there's a split. Build, say, a toolbar layout and put two views inside of it, split 50% vertically with one having a black background and the other white. Put items in your toolbar on both left and right sides. They will either be all black or all white, only contrasting with half the screen.
[0] Or, at least, I have yet to find out what this property is.
[1] Hell, for icons and text they could XOR the alpha mask with the underlying pixels, or a blurred version thereof, to make text that will always contrast.
> You will not think about liquid glass after a day, especially if you turn on the new options.
I wouldn’t say so. The “Increase Contrast” and “Show Borders” accessibility options make liquid glass just bearable to me, but the new UI design is still ungracefully buggy and unnecessarily hard(er) to use. (See e.g. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/liquid-glass/ for a detailed discussion.)
Sure, life goes on. However, considering the price tag of an iPhone/iPad, I understand how iOS 26 is off-putting to so many people – despite all the other new features.