See the iOS 26 Liquid Glass Design in Action

[JGIGS]

There are plenty of people who require as stable as possible OS for mission critical work. This is probably why I've stuck with older OS for as long as possible.
I stuck with Win7 for years, begrudgingly moving to Win10 because the company uses QuickBooks (a pure garbage account program, IMO) and it doesn't run on Win7.

They're not making money off me, since I won't move to a buggy OS. I'm sticking with Catalina until forced to upgrade.

Hey I get. I usually wait till at least a .1 release of new operating systems and likely will do the same with 26 I also run my Apple hardware into the ground before upgrading. But there are lots of people that download the software asap, betas as well and by new devices as soon as they come out.

Most people aren't chomping at the bit to update their operating systems of devices for bug fixes. But totally understand those of you that need that for work and that lingering bugs are frustrating.

 

[MrGimper]

why are we judging a first developer release as if it is a FINAL shipping product?

the aim, as always, is to test it with a wider group and tune it based on feedback. like every year...
this is just a bigger visual change than most years so of course more will need to be fixed.
system wide, across all devices... what a massive UX challenge.

we have months and many iterations before this becomes the real OS26.

i would expect very rapid tweaking before the public even see it on their devices for testing.

the few screenshots i've seen so far have some great things and a lot of faint, low contrast, difficult to read bits.
there is no way it stays like this.
or most people will just stick with their current Light or Dark schemes.

I’m not treating it like a final product at all. What I am doing is saying they had lots of similar UI issues with iOS 7 so why haven’t they learnt from those and applied that learning as a foundation for iOS 26 b1. For example, CC is a total cluster. How that made it into even b1 is a shtshow. Transparent notification on the lock screen are also a shtshow.

Do they not hold lessons learned meetings.

 

[mlayer]

View attachment 2519133
You call this clean UI?

Personally I liked the Control Strip back in the day, or at least the ability to collapse it into a little nub on the left edge when I didn't need it, which was often.

 

[mlayer]

I installed Mac OS 26 over the weekend. I didn't feel overwhelmed by it. There are some bugs related to drawing the windows and carrying over colors in Safari, which is to be expected in beta 1. I feel good enough about it to install iOS 26.

A lot of the "Aero 2.0" discussion is misplaced. Screens back then didn't have the pixel density of today's displays, so they wouldn't dare put white text on different shades of gray backgrounds, especially transparent ones because they didn't have the graphics horsepower to pull it off. They went with black text on white or very light, so of course it appeared more legible because it naturally had greater contrast. I applaud this experiment in 26, which will elicit plenty of feedback to dial back the effect. All you have to do is look at Notification Center to see different approaches to the transparency/translucency issue.

There are three different background shades in the app notifications, weather widget, and calendar. Control Center also has its own controversial look. FWIW the biggest problem is the lack of uniformity. This should all settle out over the beta period. Regardless, I'm glad Apple is taking this step, which Youtuber chon discussed over the weekend. He pointed out that the original culprit of the recent flat design wave was, of all things, the Zune in 2006.

 

[wbeasley]

I’m not treating it like a final product at all. What I am doing is saying they had lots of similar UI issues with iOS 7 so why haven’t they learnt from those and applied that learning as a foundation for iOS 26 b1. For example, CC is a total cluster. How that made it into even b1 is a shtshow. Transparent notification on the lock screen are also a shtshow.

Do they not hold lessons learned meetings.

or perhaps it's a mostly new group of UI designers?
it's been what a decade or more?

people come and go.

it's beta. not even public beta... the tinkering and tweaking begins now