Steve Troughton-Smith

Last year Apple released an API to go with Liquid Glass, UIScrollEdgeEffect.

UIScrollEdgeEffect can be set to 'hard', or 'soft' edges.

In some builds, the effect uses a progressive blur. In others, a gradient. In some OS releases, it dynamically changes between a light and dark gradient based on what's underneath. The system defaults might change from 'soft' to 'hard' (opaque bar) without notice, like beta 2.

I just freaking wish I could just pick the options I want. Sometimes I want a blur!

Jun 24 at 10:51amIvory for Mac
Show threadSteve Troughton-Smith5d ago
In beta 1 of iOS 26, UIScrollEdgeEffect even let you have a progressive blur on the bottom edge of a window. They removed that, and never re-enabled it — you get a gradient now, at best. A forced progressive blur would have solved so many of my visual issues in the development of Broadcasts 4, and it worked for a single beta build over a year ago and never again
Show threadKyle Bashour5d ago
@stroughtonsmith It’s very annoyingly depending on the content. If there’s text with no container, it still does a blur, but otherwise just the gradient
Show threadSaeed Taheri5d ago
@kylebshr @stroughtonsmith Exactly. Having something with a glass effect, either one of those system components such as UISegmentedControl or a custom glass container, changes the effect completely.
Show threadMax Rudberg5d ago
@stroughtonsmith That sound really unpredictable! I’m not a fan of the bars, I felt the floating looks was nice. And I’m still missing the separation of things like bottom toolbars. The buttons just sit there, muddled with the content below, but visually they look like they’re on the same level. Hope to see more tweaks to this… 🤞
Show threadChojubo5d ago

@stroughtonsmith it’s definitely slightly mysterious.

In my experience it seems to enable the scroll edge progressive blur when there’s some text in the toolbar that *isn’t* set atop a Liquid Glass background. I guess the logic being, if the text has no background, then the scroll edge will blur to keep it more readable. That was my experience with 26 at least. Not sure if that’s still the case in 27.

Long story short, you might be able to trigger the blur with a hack by placing some text in the bottom edge toolbar, and maybe hiding it via opacity or similar? 😅 (I wish we had proper control over this, as you say)

Show threadTim Oliver5d ago

@stroughtonsmith I made a library for that. 😄

It straddles private API use, but it’s already shipping in a couple of apps on the App Store.

https://github.com/TimOliver/BlurUIKit

Show threadjoe kimberlin5d ago
@stroughtonsmith it seems like ‘soft’ doesn’t even include the blur anymore :( just a tiny gradient
Show threadSaeed Taheri5d ago

@stroughtonsmith This API is so unpredictable. It doesn't behave consistently at all. Sometimes the SwiftUI version (`safeAreaBar) is better.
I've sent this project (https://github.com/sdtaheri/ScrollEdgeEffectBlurIssue) to Apple: FB23064349

Look at the screenshots. It got worse on iOS 27 even with explicit soft or hard styles.

GitHub - sdtaheri/ScrollEdgeEffectBlurIssue: Minimal iOS repro for scroll edge effect and blur behavior across UIKit and SwiftUI

Minimal iOS repro for scroll edge effect and blur behavior across UIKit and SwiftUI - sdtaheri/ScrollEdgeEffectBlurIssue

GitHub