The more time I spend with Liquid Glass, the more I don't understand Alan Dye's and the design team's obsession with minimizing UI chrome and "prioritizing content" instead.
With collapsed tab bars in iOS 26, it now takes me two taps to switch between Library and Music.
Is that…better? The animations are gorgeous, sure. But does it actually *work* better? 🤔
I mean, you know me, I'm not the kind of person who hates change. I love to switch between systems, try new stuff, and be on the bleeding edge of tech.
But things have to be an improvement, and most of Liquid Glass feels like a sidestep with beautiful animations, a great physics engine, and worse usability than before.
We'll see what happens I guess!
Like, let's be honest: does this look good? Is it readable?
The animations are fantastic. The glass effect is a marvel of engineering.
But does it work well?
@gedeonm @viticci It’s absurd. I’d be pissed off if a first-year uni student handed this in. Apple is meant to employ the best. Why is no one stopping this stuff from getting out into the world?
Basics of design: text should be legible. The end. Yet we have white on light grey, and sometimes even black text on a black background.
And under Apple’s own goals, these systems fail. They’re supposed to let people focus on content, but all this glass stuff distracts *from* the content.
@gedeonm @viticci What’s also disappointing:
1. There are good things elsewhere in these systems that are getting overlooked because of this dreadful UI redesign
2. There are now extra pressures on devs to conform to some obsession Apple has with glass/transparency, which is something that, to date, has *never* worked on screens.
3. Android 16 is, for the most part, now a much better looking – and *more usable* OS than iOS 26. How did that happen? Seriously.
@gedeonm @viticci Agreed. Although the bit I still return to is the tvOS section in the keynote, with someone trying to convince everyone that controls that are transparent and yet reflect the light of content that is playing beneath them is somehow less distracting and affords users more focus.
All of this is back to front. I’d love to know who kicked all this rubbish off. I do also fear there is now a lack of a ‘taste arbiter’ sufficiently senior at Apple. Still, it’s ‘just a beta’, eh? :/
@craiggrannell @gedeonm @viticci
I’m pretty sure it is a move for making code that works in an AR environment when some visibility of a real world background might be important.
But even if Xcode becomes a write once distribute to all platforms coding home base, you need to be able to opt out platforms where this transparency nonsense makes absolutely zero sense.
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