These images from the Creator Studio announcement perfectly illustrate the failure of Liquid Glass.
It doesn't get out of the way of your content — it INVADES your content.
This is an image editor! Yet HUGE regions of the image are invaded, blurred, and obscured by translucent UI, making both the image and the UI worse.
Low-contrast UI on blurry content doesn't clarify anything or get out of your way — it distorts the content AND the UI into an ugly, unusable slurry.
I just noticed something when I got another #Apple developer email: I don’t trust Apple anymore to teach me how to „build great apps“.
1/4 of the email is about Liquid Glass. In the *best* case they are going to teach me how to make the best out of a fundamentally bad idea. But that‘s already a huge uphill battle, because while doing so all the presenters will have to pretend that it‘s a great idea.
Another 1/4 is about Apple‘s design resources. But we all know how the HIG degraded over the years. And the design resources eg. in the form of Figma files are quite disconnected from what the UI frameworks are doing. And it’s also a bunch of Liquid Glass.
Another 1/4 is about Foundation Models. I get that it’s all the hype. But I *don‘t care*. You are selling this *way* too hard. How about you tell me about Processor Trace? (Ok, I‘m *very* biased here, but it’s a very cool technology)
And the last 1/4 is „Build great apps with #SwiftUI“, which is *exactly* what I‘d want to learn about. Except, over the last years I lost trust that this is possible with SwiftUI. And if it was, why haven‘t you taught us in the last 5 years how to do it? Why should I believe this is more than toy examples this time?
So I completely lost trust that I get anything out of Apple‘s content. 😔
One of my favorite quotes ever, from why the lucky stiff:
"when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."
Apple's software is a dumpster fire, unfortunately.
https://blog.johnozbay.com/what-happened-to-apples-attention-to-detail.html
At the veeeery bottom of Apple's towering infero of half-truths is the lie that developers *owe Apple* for its generosity in building a way for folks to build software for iOS.
This is *ludicrous*.
Apple would build SDKs and distribution mechanisms *just to make the iPhone viable*, regardless. And every thinking person knows it. The fact that this is only being chipped into relief one court finding at a time just shows how thick they've laid it on, and how pliant the tech press are.
With Apple and Google loaning their app stores to authoritarians, our tech press should be asking: what are the alternatives? And why is Apple working so hard to suppress the web?
But they are not asking those questions:
https://infrequently.org/2025/10/the-app-store-was-always-authoritarian/
Apple bent the knee for months, leaving many commentators to ask why. But the reasons are not mysterious: Apple wants things that only the government can provide, things that will defend and extend its power to extract rents, rather than innovate. Namely, selective exemption from tarrifs and an end to the spectre of pro-competition regulation and the threat of real browsers in the US, the EU, and around the world.
99+% of the tech press, and basically all of the commentariat, reflexively applies the Apple vs. Google horse-race frame to these App Store takedown stories, and y'all are telling on yourselves.
The question of the moment isn't *"is Tim better than Sundar?"* – hot tip, all tech CEOs are in hock to short-term shareholders – it's "*what are the open alternatives to this rotten duopoly?".*
I swear none of these people have rubbed two neurons together about platform choice in a decade+.
Paul Kafasis with a single-sentence blog post that says everything about Apple removing ICEBlock from the App Store:
"Gosh, it’s almost like Apple serving as the exclusive gatekeeper for what software can be installed on the iPhone (and iPad, and Apple TV, and Apple Watch, and Vision Pro) is a bad thing that creates a single point of failure which can be abused by increasingly authoritarian governments."
Marco Arment
Joachim
Bob Nystrom
mattcomi
Chris Pirillo
Alex Russell
Manton Reece