I assume it's technology driven. The effect is probably expensive to produce so phones with weaker performance can't do it.

My humble opinion is they took the opportunity to play “look over here!” after the Apple Intelligence (or lack thereof) fiasco.

It’s shareholder driven. They have to act like they’re still innovative even though they have no idea where to actually innovate at this point. So they chose to change something very visible that they could point to as a big innovative change to keep share prices moving in the right direction. Ever heard of end-stage capitalism? Well, this is it - when every principle is sacrificed in the name of revenue.

This feels more like Windows Vista when everybody wanted to switch it off but ultimately switched back to Windows XP until Windows 7 was launched. The liquid glass confuses a lot of folks and it's good when done minimally and not all over the OS.

I think the difference with earlier UI redesigns is that the supposed benefit of liquid glass is the whole opacity thing, where several things are laid on top of each other while trying to show what's underneath. That just creates a much more messy interface, making it harder to see what's going on since they've dropped UI-classics like using contrast to make text readable. That's also why the setting to tune down liquid glass is found in accessibility and not, say, display preferences.

I'm a bit too old to have been privvy to any Win XP design backlash, but I think the more apt comparison is with Windows Vista, where transparency was also a major part of the design philosophy (usability be damned). We have pretty good ideas about what makes a good UI/UX and none of those ideas involve using transparency to make readability worse while also not really making what's under the half-transparent element visible or readable.

IMO:

1. There's actual value in getting used to things. Part of the reason older people can't use computers well and get scammed is because trendy software companies constantly reshuffle the same stuff and they can't keep up.

2. A lot of UI progression is objectively worse, and I do mean objectively. Less legibility, more clicks to do the same actions, etc. We just get used to back software.

iOS 26 is bad software. We might get used to it being bad one day. It's still bad.

Similarly, Windows 8 was bad software. We actually undid that one.

With the difference that up to and including Windows 7, you could actually easily and officially make it look more or less like Windows 2000.

Every little change to Facebook was met with huge protests back in the day too (before they learned to do them gradually and also before they trashed it).

Yes, people are upset with every UI redesign that is not an incremental change.

So stop redesigning your damn UIs!

I know why they do it. That's because if you don't change the UI, it is like you didn't change anything, and people don't feel the need to upgrade. It is important for marketing and therefore I don't expect it to change.

But if you really care about usability, don't change your UIs without a good reason. Also, keep in mind that not every user is a young tech addict, it is hard enough to explain to my grandparents how to use a computer/smartphone without them being thrown off by UI changes. Ok, it may not be where your money is, but that's part of accessibility.

> Some people are always upset with change

You defended "change" in general, not in this particular case. "Change could be good so this change must be good" is a weak argument that can be used to defend any change. This is a shallow dismissal of the complaints instead of a solid defense of the change.

The poor contrast of the UI strains the eyesight, all the transparency and glass effects are distracting and tiring, so are many of the animations which just introduce a delay for no reason, and so on. I unlock my phone and the top row of icons is "thrown" on the screen with a big delay and a very ample motion to the point it was disturbing.

These aren't useful changes, they cause a loss of practical value to many users even if they bring esthetic value to others. The changes most brought up in complaints are objectively worse that what we had before. It's form over function and tells the world the designers had no ideas how to practically improve the UI so they added visual bells and whistles, flashes and sparkles.

> Isn't this the case for all UI redesigns? When youtube changed to their current design there were posts about browser extensions to restore the old interface.

Yes but UI redesigns usually involve UX redesign as well. It's not just visual so you actually gain something from it (even if at first it feels like a regression).

But liquid glass helps me do what... see my background?....!?

True, and it's the same with any big redesign that it should tend to be the worst it will ever be at the start and then be gradually refined. I expect it will end up quite good by the time they want to start over again in 10 or so years, and people will complain about losing it and how bad the new interface is! At least there are a few good years in the middle to end of each cycle!

I'm not an apple user, have used neither the old or new design, and if I had to choose, I'd pick the old one any day of the week. Liquid Glass very much feels like Apple's Boeing 737 MAX moment.

The Liquid Glass design has awful contrast, and seems really amateurish with how stuff on the screen overlaps. Looks like the stuff you'd see in KDE 10-15 years ago[1], back when compositing window managers were kinda hot and new.

[1] This is from 2012, and arguably deals with the transparency-induced readability issues better than Liquid Glass seems to: https://imgur.com/a/x1LmBAQ

No. This isn’t about preference for certain aesthetics. The new glass UI elements are objectively worse for readability.

> Isn't this the case for all UI redesigns?

This one is particularly bad because it's shit. It makes the device harder to use for most users. It introduces a load of utterly pointless, and/or confusing, patterns/motifs... like:

- why do some navigation buttons hover about 3 meters above the panel they control (the enormous drop shadow around back/next/close buttons)

- why is the settings sidebar floating above the settings panel content, such that only the image carousels but not the text slide under it?

- why are the rounded corners of panels and windows so round that about 40px of every window's height and width becomes unusable?

- why do I have to see my wallpaper, blurry, under every fucking control, icon, component, list and panel? It started with Lion where the wallpaper would bleed through the sidebars of windows, even when they had other windows beneath them

Someone at Apple decided the "desktop" paradigm that made their computers usable has become redundant, but they're taking it apart in tiny steps, drawn out over years and multiple releases. The desktop paradigm was really good: you could have multiple apps open side by side and drag & drop content between them, just like you could if you were assembling physical things on a physical desktop. With Liquid Glass, you wouldn't imagine that was possible, because parts of the apps hover 3m off the surface, making it visually unsettling to navigate your windows. And your windows are made of various grades of glass which is brittle, and smooth, and you can't stick anything to it. Glass isn't a work surface unless you're doing stained glass windows. To do work, you need the confidence the surface will hold up beneath your actions, and a little bit of friction so your materials and targets don't slide all over the place. Why on earth are Apple creating the illusion of an unworkable work surface?

I'm convinced they're trying to deprecate the menu bar entirely by making it less and less usable (thinner text, transparency), but they're not willing to move it to the tops of windows like on Windows. Are they hoping we'll all give up using (because they've made it shit) it so they can just let it go? (like iOS?).

Change for the sake of change is not a good thing.

I'm still mad at Youtube for their redesigns, to the point that I moved over to Freetube, since I found normal Youtube that hostile of an experience.

Sort of. The difference is this one has real, objective UX issues with hit areas, inconsistent icon use, making every website with position fixed elements broken, and constantly drawing attention to itself.

All of these are fixable without backing away from the big idea. But it’s pretty rough so far.

Yes, but that doesn't contradict the comment about innovation at Apple. They are now at a similar stage to Osprey backpacks. They release a new look every year but with all the same features and functionality that we had a decade ago.

For what it’s worth, I’m definitely leaning “Apple fanboy” and have been amenable to their past UI redesigns. This is the first that I truly think is a regression, and I immediately turned on Reduce Transparency after updating.

Can you share more about this?

I've only just started developing in SwiftUI, but I do know that some of these changes are automatic based on the components you use not necessarily a specific choice by the app developer. I started developing my app with the prior iOS version, but using standard components. After updating to iOS 26, the glass-effects were automatically added.

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.

It's trash and is what happens on a yearly release cadence when you need to have a driver for the release. Sometimes you need to do something. Anything. That's why they have this monstrosity of a UI. Total garbage.

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.

From what I've seen the Apple apps all have the same radius but 3rd party apps are largely yet to update. Same thing happened when they changed the stoplight window buttons and some 3rd party apps still had the glossy ones years later.

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.

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'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.

Now that I'm getting older I like to pull out my "curmudgeon card" and blame it on the younger generation. New graduates entering the work grew up spending more time on mobile phones than laptops/desktops, and I wonder if these changes are to cater to this market that's shifting from mostly-mobile screen time to mostly-desktop. I imagine it's not too long before this segment is the majority.

I feel like we saw similar changes with the previous shift where new graduates knew GSuite and MS Office was some the software their parents would complain about. It's my shibboleth for identify my generation of computer users.

The recent Android 12 changes really messed up the alarms UI in particular.

Used to be when your morning alarm goes off on the bedside table you can just reach over and swipe right... now there are two buttons at the bottom of the screen and you have to look at it and carefully press the correct one.

Also when setting an alarm it used to be set after you selected the day and time. But now they added an extra 'save' button. I am not the only person who thought they set a morning alarm and got a nasty late surprise.

Just changing things for no reason and making them worse.

Well, at least they don't change it much

Android is _mostly_ OK. Their stupidest move (so far) was mandating edge-to-edge apps without a way for users and apps to opt out of them.

Otherwise, the UI stays mostly the same, just becoming a bit more bloated ("finger friendly") with every release.

The most annoying thing for me is the waste of screen space from the bubbles around notifications and menu options. Apparently, having stuff floating now gives a "perception of lightness and motion".

I unironically think staying in Cupertino is hurting them.

I think it is probably only a hardware issue in the sense that the iPhone 13 mini is probably too old/slow to run iOS 26 as quickly as the old version.

I updated my old/spare phone - an iPhone SE3, which I think has a similar processor and memory (A15 and 4GB). It became a lot more sluggish. I learned my lesson not to upgrade my main phone, also an iPhone 13 mini.

I also noticed a disappointing slow down on a 9th gen iPad, which has even older internals. Actually, perhaps I should be quickly looking into downgrading that if it's possible.

Maybe you missed the part where I said this only started happening after the update. Battery health percent has not changed.

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).

My understanding Apple will remove it sometime next year April.

I'm sure the misalignment is there but I honestly havent noticed anything. Maybe I'm too busy getting things done.

I installed Tahoe on my desktop and laptop the day it came out. I really stopped noticing it after the first day or two, there aren't a lot of places that have overwhelming, liquid glassy-blur/transparency on macOS that you run into often. I think the only time I'm reminded that Liquid Glass is "a thing" is in the Apple Music app where they went ham with it.

I have Tahoe on my personal laptop and the previous release on my work one and tbh I hardly notice any of the differences. It's more noticeable on the iphone where the system UI takes up more of the screen but on the mac it's 99% just the same full screen apps you always had.

Same here. I don't mind it at all. If I had to choose I'd go for the previous design language, but I don't personally get the hate.

“Show Borders” is available in Accessibility-> Display & Text Size in iOS 26.1. (Along with Increase Contrast and Reduce Transparency)

+1 for using bonkers