iOS 26 Beta 2 Fixes Control Center Design

[Rettun1]

I hope they provide users with the options to tweak this (funny, I know…)

But having not installed the betas, I was very interested by the first glassier version of beta 1. Beta 2 just looks the same as iOS 18.

The glassy buttons in control center now hardly interact with the colors/shapes of the wallpaper behind it, which I thought was the whole point of this design language in the first place?

 

[nsklaus]

poor apple, they had to release a beta1 only to find out that transparency let the user see what's behind and that it gets in the way of readability. i wonder what the team in charge of this new UI fiasco since bigsur will (re)discover next.. i hope it won't take too long for them to learn how to make acceptable UI from all their trial and errors so macos can finally get back to having a decent looking UI.

judging apple from history, it will probably takes years of user misery before someone at apple gets in contact with a significant amount of coffee and find out they've been making crappy UI for a long time.

it's been 5years since the bigsur horror, new UI revamp already.
and "liquid sh*t" new brain fart idea ensure it will take probably another 5years of pain.

hey apple, send your team of newbies you've put in charge of design this new UI, and have them go look at KDE. have them take a few hints from there.

 

[Kuskah]

Looks better.

The screenshot in the article doesn't really showcase the original problem well, when the Control Center is open over a page full of icons. That was extremely messy and the added blur seems to help a lot to put the Control Center back in focus.

 

[Krizoitz]

It wouldn't surprise me if they fully expected they would tweak the transparency but decided to go ahead with Beta 1 and get some additional feedback to guide those tweaks.

It’s entirely possible, probable even that Beta 2 was locked down before much of the feedback from Beta 1 was known.

 

[DickieSmith]

More usable at the cost of being a little less pretty. Good.

The first beta seemed to be taking the new design language to an extreme in order to show it off, and now they are tinkering with it to find a balance and ensure it the new aesthetic doesn't detract from user experience.

 

[stevefeinstein]

I find it really disappointing that Apple is spending any time on Liquid Glass while we wait for over-promised Apple Intelligence features.

Do you seriously think they can only afford to work on one of those things at a time ? I guarantee they have enough resources to do both at the same time.

 

[ElvenPrince995]

That still looks absolutely horrible. I hate this design language. I want an option to disable this transparent crap and keep the original icons. This looks so cheap that I will not be updating to ios 26.

 

[mlayer]

Works for me. For a screen like Control Center that I don't expect to linger on - to pop in and out when I change a setting - what I care about is having few distractions. Beta 1 failed at that because it required more active cognition. Beta 2 improves on that a lot.

 

[wolverinechris]

I agree, actually. Now it just looks slightly different than it did on iOS 18 and takes away from the aesthetic.

+1 on this. I wish instead of going "more blur" they had gone with darker.

 

[pauliaK]

B1 looks much better and would be my preferred option, at least initially. Apple should just let people choose between the two to make everyone happy.

 

[MacFarmer]

haha, they just keep going back and back and back. This design was not a great idea..

 

[Ipadonly1]

I don’t see the point really. I thought the point of liquid glass was that the buttons themselves sit on top of the content. Now they’re sitting on top of blurred content, but still have this sort of glass refraction thing going on? So they’re now refracting blurred content? I think this whole glass thing only works if you put it right on top of content

 

[TechWhisperer]

In beta 6 we’re back at iOS17. LMAO!

 

[avro707]

I still think the background could be treated differently to make the buttons more visible, but this is improved.

I have turned on reduce transparency on my phone to get around this completely.

If I could I’d disable the animations completely as well.

 

[basdeninard]

judging apple from history, it will probably takes years of user misery before someone at apple gets in contact with a significant amount of coffee and find out they've been making crappy UI for a long time.

😂 I can see that happening. Apple can be very slow to react to stupid decisions, because they often go in a particular direction without a backup plan if the market says no. The Mac Pro (2013), Butterfly Keyboards and MacBook Pro Touch Bar are just a few examples that come to my mind.