Been wracking my brain and I finally figured out a way to reduce Liquid Glass distortion without losing animations

[Brettka7]

Edit: I’ve found this only works really well for light setup. Dark mode introduces a whole new legibility issue, so I’ve now added to my sunset/sunrise automations to frost the glass during daytime and turn it clear at night.

From the moment I took delivery of my iPhone Air, I’ve been struggling to adjust to some of the Liquid Glass effects that just feel too milky, loud, and noisy for my brain. The constant movement and swapping between light and dark bubbles does not allow my mind to relax. I think I just figured out how to decrease glass effects while increasing blur, and it is so simple.

First, enable Reduce Motion system-wide. Then, go to Per-App Settings and disable Reduce Motion for Home Screen & App Library. I personally chose to disable for Safari as well to keep all animations.

You get a beautiful, readable “frosted glass” (or old-school iOS 7 blur, I suppose) with zero distortion in all your apps this way, but you still keep your full-glass notifications, dock, and app folders. If an app looks weird, force close it and check again.

The only “issues” I noticed right away are:

1. Step two needs to be enabled, then disabled again after every reboot. This works for me, but YMMV. Can anyone think of a shortcut to automate this process upon power-on?
2. A few apps are mildly affected with fragmented animation choices/pop-up menus in stock iOS 26 (such as Safari and Music) and those choices become exasperated with Reduce Motion, but I think they’re just bugs Apple never fixed. Safari is by far the worst offender. It’s worth it for me until I see what changes at WWDC 2026.
3. Pop-up menu animation is a simple fade most places, and there seems to be a 0.5 second lag. Very minor, worth it for me as well.

And some pics of how the frosted glass looks:

And an example to show the difference in legibility:

 

[SmOgER]

Frosted glass is so much cleaner as you compare them side by side. Liquid glass looked the best as the initial implementation but that’s not practical and would never work in the real world in all conditions. They had to dial it down which then made it not as bad in edge cases but it’s also worse where it looked good earlier.

PS. I’m surprised that reducing motion actually changes transparency settings. And how UI elements LOOK when not in motion…

 

[BotchQue]

Not very practical, BUT thanks for posting that, hopefully Apple will see it and implement it in some way.

 

[01cowherd]

I tried it out and it looks good and is much less distracting. I could use this version of appleOS 26 if they had a toggle only for the Liquid Glass effects. Too bad Reduce Motion doesn't remove all of the bad effects. I still want the normal animations, though, so will be going back to Reduce Transparency instead.

Edit: added a per-app setting for Safari as well and it keeps the non-liquid look with the liquid functionality!

I couldn't get this to work. The glass distortions came back when I added an exception for Safari.

 

[Brettka7]

I couldn't get this to work. The glass distortions came back when I added an exception for Safari.

Sadly, it has come back for me too. With this setup, you have to leave the Home Screen as Liquid Glass in order to have multitasking animations, so I’m okay with the Safari search bar being liquid as well since the placement is in the same area as the dock. I can make it make sense in my mind, I guess.

I’ve also found today that I think I like Liquid Glass in dark mode but I don’t like it in light mode. Because of this: I set up a shortcut:

Sunset | dark mode, dark wallpaper, reduce motion off

Sunrise | light mode, light wallpaper, reduce motion on

We’ll see if I break it!

 

[SmOgER]

Honestly this in tandem with enable borders looks quite good.