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iOS 26's Liquid Glass Design Draws Criticism From Users

Hate it.
In a series of major recent misses. Vision pro. Touch bar. Apple AI. Liquid glass.
They'll have to abandon it sooner or later. Otherwise known as tone it down.
 
I like the changes. I think the icons need a bit more polish. I would prefer more liquid glass. Lol

I never liked the flat GUI that became the default across platforms for years. I did like Microsoft mobiles use of a flat GUI the best and we all know what happened to that OS. I would probably be using a MS mobile phone now if it were available. In fact, that entire situation is what got me back into Apple. I used to love liquid glass in MacOS. I think it is nice to alternate. The flat GUI at the time was a nice change but now it is boring. With the state of current hardware more animations are nice. Again I think the entire GUI needs more polish but for the first release I like it.

In my opinion they need to tone it up with liquid glass. A little nostalgia isn't always a bad thing.
 
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I find it ok on the iPad, but I don't care for it on the iPhone. I especially dislike it in Safari. One of the ideas behind it was to make the UI go away, so we can focus on the content. But I find it to be exactly opposite. As I scroll I have a blob of the UI showing me the URL, hovering over my content, distracting me. I would much rather have a single bar across the screen at the bottom. The bar could even be liquid glass for all I care. Just don't have this blob giving me the illusion of me seeing more of the content, when I'm not.
 
GrumpyOldGuy52 said:
That's not how effective change works.

Effective change is implemented because a problem needs to be resolved, and those solving the problem understand what they need to do from the user perspective. Windows 95, as much as I hated it, was driven by changes requested by Windows users to make the OS more user-friendly—and it did. Regardless of how we old-school Mac users want to think of it, something like Win95 was necessary for the large-scale adoption of the home computer and everything that came with it. Win95 made DOS easy, and it allowed your parents to work on a spreadsheet from work after you played Doom. It was a seismic shift that affected the world; it was not solely change for change's sake.

What, precisely, is Liquid Glass solving? Sure, Apple could make the argument that it's a common UI, but the UX differs from device to device because the devices' purposes change. As I mentioned way back on another page, implementing a common design language across the devices makes sense—it would allow me to quickly move from an iPad to a Vision Pro to a Mac and generally know what I'm doing and how to navigate around each device. That's not what Liquid Glass is doing—it's simply one type of frosting on different types of cake.
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I agree with you regarding the need for Liquid Glass. It seems to be purely eye candy and yet many will not like or want it. My main observation, despite that, is that new features within the OS seem to be desirable and that the often reduced battery life with new versions on older devices seems to have actually improved.

You rightly observe the consistency across devices so perhaps we would not an explanation from Apple engineers as to how they see Liquid Glass improving real-world functionality across all their devices.
 
I’m really enjoying it on my iPhone 16. (It’s in perfect condition with 98% battery capacity after a year and I don’t feel a need to update). I just wish we could change the system fonts.
 
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