(Almost) A Year With iOS 26

[iLuddite]

As we await the first iOS 27 developer beta I thought it might be fun to have a place to reflect on the last (approximate) year with iOS 26. Overall, how has your experience been with Liquid Glass as a user and/or developer? Any outstanding gripes or specific changes you'd like to see come 27?

For me it's glaring visual niggles—like broken Safari address bar padding or a sometimes partially-obstructed page in Music (see attached)—that have persisted through almost every iOS 26 iteration (and, yes: like others I have submitted [sometimes multiple] bug reports). And then there's longstanding and perhaps more widespread issues like app icon redrawing and inherent design missteps such as certain interface elements remaining glassily translucent behind Reduce Transparency's opaque top layer.

What has improved? What has remained the same or worsened? Feel free to include watchOS/macOS/iPadOS/tvOS/visionOS 26 experiences.

 

[HouseLannister]

iPadOS remains the most broken for me. Safari address bar flickers from black to white. Resizing the windows messes up the top navigation and menu bar elements, causing overlapping elements or items to just become non-responsive to touch. Buttons in multiple apps often have a weird effect on hover that makes it obvious that the glass is a skin on top of the old GUI. It still feels unfinished and creates daily annoyances.

watchOS is much more basic and delivers a much more consistent experience. It's... fine. I don't think they did enough with the cards/widgets/whatever-they-are-called to make them match the Liquid Glass. The Liquid Glass watch faces are all awful. But they didn't ruin it, so yay(?)

iOS is mostly fine with just a solid black wallpaper and dark mode icons. I still hate the edge highlight on all the icons and widgets. And the bottom search bar still gets lost in the visual clutter too often. But far less visual glitches than iPadOS.

I feel overall that Liquid Glass should have been an option. The iOS 18 look should have gone even more flat and basic looking. The green and blue everywhere should have been heavily desaturated to make the OS look less Windows XP with the painfully bright colors everywhere. Then there should be a Theme/Skin/Launcher setting area. Make Liquid Glass enabled by default if you must, but have an easy off switch that goes super minimalist with the theming. Let 3rd parties create custom launchers and icon packs and sell them in the App Store. Basically, give users the "Apple Way" but also more control and customization options.

From a development perspective, I think overall app innovation has slowed greatly this year as everyone tries to make their apps more glassy rather than do anything meaningful. Also, the 2-year pause on AI innovation hasn't helped any. Too many apps in a holding pattern. iOS 27 is going to fix some things, but the changes to multitasking for folding phones and the addition of AI will create months and months of work for every app developer and it probably won't be until iOS 28 or later that we feel caught up to our Android brethren.