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iOS 26's Liquid Glass Design Draws Criticism From Users

I updated my iPad on Monday and my 14PM yesterday morning. It's gone well enough. There are some glitches and my battery life isn't as good on either device but that seems to happen with every *.0 release of iOS. My watch battery has also taken a bit of a hit.

Of the issues that I've noticed, the ones that annoy me the most are:
  1. Integration between my Magic Keyboard and iPad Pro M3 12.9 isn't right. When I type something that used to display an emoji to use, it is no longer displaying it. I have to hit the globe button and select the emoji that way.
  2. The search feature in settings is badly broken for me on both devices. I have no idea where most settings are and usually typing a few letter of the setting I'm looking for will bring up a nice list to choose from. The current list has many fewer items and is generally not showing what I am looking for. This is on both devices.
  3. On the iPad Pro, swiping to the App Library is slow and stuttery. If I have the button in the dock and tap it, it pops right up with no slowdown.
  4. Battery life isn't what it used to be. I used to write apps for iPhones and iPads and I seem to remember that rendering transparency takes more battery. 🤷
My wish would be to have a transparency slider on the clear icons, not so I can make them less transparent. I'd like them to be more transparent. I do not think that they look like glass - they look like white semi-transparent icons. I really like the way that the non-glass icons look. I've always had them on dark/large so other than the shimmer around the edges of the icons, the home screen looks pretty much the same to me.

There are definite bugs but I'm sure that Apple will be cleaning them up and optimizing things over the next year. I see a good future for this iOS. I think it's a neat change.
 
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I don't hate it, but I do think it's very "beta" looking. This should not have been released until refined quite a bit more. There's so many examples of poor padding between UI elements, strange extra light boxes that don't line up with things, etc.

As well, the lack of an accessibility feature to turn it off, from Apple, is mind-boggling.
 
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On MacOS the rounded corners and the inability to move a window all the way to the menu bar means bits of the background poke through and it’s distracting and makes things harder to read.
On all devices the transparency makes things harder to read. The constantly changing colors as you scroll in many apps, too. The animations are distracting. The icons are weird - right now typing into this box on the phone I have an annoying floating pill shape with up and down arrows (web page fields) and a checkmark. The checkmark is the old “done” and it makes little sense as all either did was dismiss the keyboard and remove focus from any text entry fields.
On the watch (U1) I had to reduce transparency just to make message notifications legible because too much background was bleeding through.
On iPad, if you open a Home Screen folder then open an app from it, then slide up from the bottom, the Dock first slides up with you then suddenly realized you’re in a folder and slides back away.
On Mac the Music app for no valid reason at all changed the player controls from a sensible location at the top of the screen to a floating bar at the bottom that’s again distracting and hard to read.
Don’t even want to start in on how bad the Photos app is, now you can’t even remove the auto-generated collections (ef people & pets). And you still can’t control the sort order, newest first or oldest first, in some of those.
Overall: messy, buggy, inconsistent, bad workflows, distracting, and hard to read.

Edit: I’ve lost count of how many times Messages has asked me if I want to turn on Focus status sharing that notifications are off, and Share Your Name & Photo is at the top of the list of conversations and won’t go away despite having that turned off in the settings as well.
 
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It adds an annoying layer of lag to many tasks (because of the unnecessary animations). Lag is a profound factor for why you like or dislike an app, and a measurable waste of time. As well strive towards zero latency and 120 Hz refresh rates, it is inexplicable how Apple's UI experts made such a blunder.
 
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octoberist3 said:
My god the hater comments are insufferable. Get over yourselves. You'll either get over the design change in a week or move on to Android.

If usability were the only consideration we'd be stuck with mac os 9 platinum.
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Apple is supposedly a trillion-dollar company. If you bother to read people's comments, you'd realize that the majority of complaints are not with the design change itself, but with the sheer sloppiness, inconsistency, and amount of visual bugs everywhere on both iOS and macOS 26.

Apple used to stand for excellence, and attention to detail. Somewhere along the line recently, this has gone out the window, and instead they feel comfortable releasing an absolute mess of an experience to the public. That is quite frankly embarrassing for the resources that Apple has access to. People have the right to be upset. Usability is the very thing people have to deal with. This macOS and iOS release is a good six months away from being of the quality that should have been released to the public. Almost all of the glaringly obvious visual bugs were present in, and reported during the beta testing, and Apple chose to ignore almost all of the feedback they received.
 
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octoberist3 said:
My god the hater comments are insufferable. Get over yourselves. You'll either get over the design change in a week or move on to Android.

If usability were the only consideration we'd be stuck with mac os 9 platinum. Why bother with lickable buttons? This design is a delight, albeit one that will be refined over a decade.

It's like MacOS Aqua design but in its Final Boss form.
Click to expand...

Get over yourself. You'll be over your 'delight' in a week and clamoring for something 'fresh' and 'new' again. Meanwhile, the bugs and legibility issues will persist.
 
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its a mess. I reduced transparency and also switched safari to have the bookmarks button at the bottom again which was literally the only reason I hated anything other than safari. I switched from android just because I couldn't find a good browser with one click bookmark access
 
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Seoras said:
I absolutely love it! I love how my iPhone and iPad screens now look.
I also love how the buttons in my apps pop and are much more defined and obvious.
Lovely work! Nice and refreshing to look at.

EDIT: I should add this. I'm an App developer. This is the first time I can ever remember downloading the new Xcode and not having to spend all day fixing my apps so they still compile and work. They compiled first time.
Not only does '26 look good but it seems to run smoothly with no glitches or bugs. Normally I'd advise my family members not to install until the .1 or .2 updates came out but yesterday I was encouraging them all to upgrade immediately. Apple's comparison to previous year's updates.
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Looks like a ****** version of iOS 18. All of the polish and finesse is gone, and replaced for the sake of replacing. It's not that I can't live with it, it's that it provides little steps forward, and big steps backward.
 
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Really? Personally I love it so far! Breathed new life into to my 14 Pro max, which is literally flying with iOS 26! Very fast and smooth.

It is by far the first time I've been excited about an iOS update in YEARS. May even make the iPhone my favourite Apple gadget... take over from my iPad Pro.
 
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octoberist3 said:
I agree it lacks polish. If the only complaint are the visual bugs and lack of polish, that irks me too.

But as a design concept and metaphor, iOS 26 is far superior to iOS 18.

I read the bulk of the complaints to be on the latter point, not the "this just lacks polish right now" point you're making.
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Honestly, it's not even polish. It's basic functionality. This "public release" is nowhere near the polish level yet. That is 6-months away. This should not have been released, and whoever gave it the A-OK for public release needs to be fired.

We're talking the basics. Look at the disaster that is a basic tool like Spotlight when you use it the second time.
 

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octoberist3 said:
Not true. I was quite happy with iOS 18. iOS 26 is just better in concept, albeit lacking in polish. The metaphors make sense. We have actual buttons on the screen instead of abstract arrows and floating text and all kinds of inconsistent animations. iOS 26 as a design is far superior.

The entire OS feels 100x more alive, playful, and enjoyable to use.
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Nah. I don't need it to be playful. I'm not playing with my phone. I need it to be _useable_.

I'll take legibility over playfulness every time.
 
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It’s a lot better in use than what it looked like in any video, that’s for sure. But it’s still got its issues.

On the Watch, absolutely great.

On the TV, barely noticeable changes.

On the iPhone, just ok.

On the Mac I really haven’t noticed anything different. I mean, I see the status bar is just gone and/or clear; I use auto-hide on the dock so the only thing that really looks different is the trash can; and I don’t frequent control center.

On the iPad, especially for the notification pane, it just looks wrong - the curves in the corners just seem off.

But mostly for both iPhone and iPad… I absolutely hate that the notification pane brings up my lock screen image then animates the icon pop-in when I toss it back up. That’s my biggest complaint. I guess that’s a new entry to the dictionary for first world problem.
 
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