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?
@sb62 @viticci so if the background has a light/dark checked pattern you want each letter to alternately be black/white ? (or have some sort of black/white drop shadow)
And as you scrolled the letters would flash between black/white as they moved over the background ?
Or you could just not make the surface the text is on almost totally transparent…
@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.
@viticci Those animations are fantastic only if they don’t make you sick. Even now, *13 years* after I wrote about vestibular issues for The Guardian, this stuff still isn’t baked in. Instead, it’s a case of trying to convince Apple to fix things during the beta run and, just as often, begging them to sort it within a few months of September.
For a company that claims to care about accessibility, the 26 systems are a disaster right now. Even when accessibility settings are turned on.
@viticci I just want the cool liquid movements and flow between actions and apps but with legibility. I’m happy for them to switch things up but this is tough.
What would Liquid Glass look like under someone else as design lead I wonder?
@viticci My dad is 76 and legally blind. He can use, and he loves, his iPhone, which he uses inches from his face with a magnifier.
He's not going to be able to use iOS 26.
As in, simply, he won't be able to read it at all. Not one bit. No chance.
Him and millions like him.
@viticci best I can tell, transparent UI exists only in movies, and only so we can see the actors faces through the screens.
I’m not sure why else you would want all that stuff behind it making your “content” unreadable.
@stevenodb @viticci I meant rumored devices like the foldable phone, ultra-thin phone, foldable iPad, touchscreen MacBook, …
I’m not sure how many of those rumours are real or will end up being released, but many of them have some type of physical hardware flexibility and could bridge device classes.
This entire UX feels to me like it was first and foremost designed to solve THAT problem. We’re just seeing it applied on non-flexible hardware first.
@viticci try doing it while the view is still scrolling 😛
(Though you can drag out from the collapsed tab button to change tabs in one gesture)
@viticci I also think having the Now Playing Bar floating above the toolbar is distracting and it would work much better to use the single collapsed sheet like Safari and Shortcuts
Crazy how no one ever thought to combine a tab bar and an expendable sheet 🤔
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