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Having done some glasswork before, I’d like it if the goal had been to get pieces of glass, cut them accordingly, stack them, fire them, then look at the result and make the icon look like that. :) This IS the first introduction of Liquid Glass, so they’ve got 10 years or so to play with it.
Technically they did that in real life to code the new glass materials and elements, but fire them of course haha
 
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Muddy looking
Perfect description honestly!

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There’s a lack of contrast in color and brightness, esp since white can’t be white anymore and becomes like an eggshell. And it seems like there’s a softness beyond even what’s being introduced by the depth effect, almost looks like compression artifacts on the icons that I assume it’s automatically converting (check out the handle of the Apple Store icon)

The old icons appeared more pixel-perfect, like they were designed to look correct on a display of a specific pixel density vs ones that just look “good enough” from a distance at any size

I will say they look better than in beta 1, so maybe they’re a work in progress and we’ll see more improvements? But I don’t see the color palette or overall vibe shifting anytime soon
 
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I never want to see skeuomorphism ever again, never liked the design when I used it then, still hate it now. And using skeuomorphism on modern devices would just make them look tacky, cheap and out of place.

There are varying degrees of skeumorphism my friend.

Too much can be too much.

Too little for the sake of simple disdain (iOS 7… Jony Ive cough cough) is just short sighted and dumb.
 
Please, Apple, get rid of flat design completely. Mixing in a little bit of skeuomorphism into flat design, which is what glassmorphism is, is still flat design. Flat design is user-unfriendly because it strips away visual cues. Here's a three-step process to completely purge user interfaces of that abomination known as flat design, as well as all flat design variants like iOS 26's glassmorphism:

1. Rehire Scott Forstall.
2. Bring back the entire iOS 6 user interface and don't change anything except for increasing the resolution for today's higher resoultion screens.
3. Create new iOS 6-style skeuomophic icons and graphics for apps and features that didn't exist when iOS 6 was the latest operating system.
 
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all the no-no of designing a UI for a handheld device are here.
Poor contrast, poor legibility, poor resolution, poor memorability.
Just make a UI hard to distinguish for the next 10 years...
you mean another 10 years.

All those already went out the window when Apple switched to the flat UI in 2013 (iOS 7)
 
Where do you see more details? Both cameras have lost their power button
Details in the texture of the icons, not necessarily the glyph itself (e.g. shadows, reflections, convex/concave etc). I much prefer these kind of semi-skeuomorphic icons than what we had before.
 
I am really hoping many many developers will update their icons, I like order among them in my dock. Not a huge fan of the grey border icons that Tahoe generates for nonconforming app icons. The icon maker tool apple provides really makes the process super easy finally for nearly anyone to make them.
 
Legibility? Mate you have the name of the app WRITTEN underneath the logo. What legibility? Are you reading the icon?

Yes, that's the entire point of an icon. If you need to read the label in addition, the icon doesn't serve a purpose.
 
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Yes, that's the entire point of an icon. If you need to read the label in addition, the icon doesn't serve a purpose.
I feel like that’s mostly the individual app developers responsibility, not Apples iOS theming.

For example, this is an extremely prominent app. Can you tell what it is without Googling it? I bet most here wouldn’t. Does that mean its Apples fault, or is it the apps?IMG_0402.png
 
For the love of God just fix the keyboard lag already. Had it on the 12 Pro Max, and now on the 15 Pro Max on all of the previous IOS versions.
 
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