Using the developer beta and my phone runs quite hot. Of course, it’s a beta so they’ll probably reduce the effects to make it less of drain on performance and battery life. There is a reduce transparency toggle which does help a bit, esp. for readability. Hopefully when iOS 26 is released there’s an obvious option to reduce transparency.
My opinion on the “liquid glass” is mixed. Some parts look pretty cool. The apps (Mail, Photos, etc.) use it quite well, with only some parts are transparent making readability a bit better. I really like the change to the search bars being at the bottom, makes the phone more one-handable. Safari doesn’t look too good in my opinion, the glass effects are a bit much. The camera app just hid all the buttons, which is a bit annoying. You can have it show flash and live photos toggles in settings, which is good.
The lock screen effect with the “3d” photos is very cool, but the phone runs extra hot when it’s enabled so I turned that off. The glassy clock is pretty cool and there’s the option to make it normal again if you select “solid”. Swiping up from the lock screen makes a weird glass effect with the edges distorted and lots of rainbow fringing, which looks a bit odd. When you swipe down you can see the home screen app icons until it’s all the way down, then they all pop out of existence and the background is replaced. Bit jarring. Similar effect with swiping up, background changes with no transition, but the apps appear in an animation this time. Weird. I’m assuming this is probably a bug with the beta, at least I hope it is…
Onto the home screen. I think the “liquid glass” themes make the tinted icons look a bit better than just colour on black, I like that bit of customisability. I still do not get the “clear” icons, it quite literally is transparent and you can barely differentiate the icons. You can always swap it to the default, but there is still some annoying glass effects on app icons where it clearly isn’t natively built (I’m guessing the glass effects is applied to all icons automatically incl. third party apps, but it doesn’t look too great with some of them). The app folders look terrible though and the reflection/refraction is really distracting. The pop ups when you select text is especially annoying, popping up a huge bubble. I’ll need some time to get used to that vs just clicking right to share, translate, etc. The control center is not very nice to look at but it works fine.
Overall, in places where it’s used tastefully (in a lot of Apple’s apps, for instance) it works quite well if a bit distracting. I like the lock screen and home screen customisation and the ability to change it to “solid”. The glass effects are still quite distracting though. The reduce transparency toggle does help a bit with readability, but it’s annoying that it’s buried deep in accessibility settings. Not very accessible at all. The lock screen 3d effect is cool but is a bit subtle, and it makes the phone uncomfortably hot. There are still plenty of bugs, but that’ll hopefully be fixed in the public release. I like the option for the tinted icons but do not get the clear icons. Camera app isn’t too functional, just hiding everything isn’t better than before! The iOS 26 beta is quite fun, if very buggy, and the liquid glass works in some places but doesn’t work in all places.
Liquid Ass
hey I had that winterboard theme like 15 years ago
jfc. that is one ugly looking ui. really scraping bottom of the barrel. that is soo last years.
These guys spend a billion dollars every couple years to invent the lock screen again
Hey, it’s aqua! We’ve come full circle!
I actually really like this…
yeah i don’t remember the last time i liked something Apple made (probably over a decade by now) but this actually looks great.
I never understood products that use the next year as their version nr. Why isn’t this iOS25?
I presume because due to it releasing in September, it’s lifetime will mostly lie in 2026. But honestly Idk, I am godawful at naming things.
Vista called and wants it’s ugly back
Honestly, it looks kind of terrible to me. Not to mention how unreadable text is since there’s apparently no guaranteed contrast with black text due to the transparent backgrounds. I feel like I’m going crazy with all the random articles praising it.
I’m sorry if it’s a dumb question, but didn’t Microsoft already do this with Vista and Win 7? And I’m pretty sure transparency has been a thing on Android for a good while now:-?
Frutiger Aero.
I honestly don’t even know why I’m paying attention to Apple at this point, I think it’s like digging my nail into a freshly scarred-over cut, just to tease that sting out a bit. It’s the only way in which they have ever contributed to my feeling alive.
I only “follow” because whatever Apple does gets broadcast by every media outlet in existence. Also Google started blindly following Apple design since they killed my beloved blob emojis.
The blob emojis were one of their best features, that’s so true! I kid you not, every single time I’ve used Slack for work, for every single company which used it, someone had already uploaded the blobs! I really didn’t understand that move, the current Smile emoji looks psychotic.
Did they? MD2 and MD3 look very different from Apple’s design languages
Google themselves don’t really follow material all that closely over their entire product line.
Android 6 was basically the peak of the UI, IMO, the icons were very consistent and nice early material.
In later versions they shrank the icons and stuffed them into circles and started using a horrible color scheme, then they killed blobmoji and started outright copying Apple’s hideous emojis with that awful gradient and pseudo-skeumorphic visuals.
i mean yes, but this is a more dynamic transperency that reacts more to backgrounds, merging/separating with other elements, etc.
I mean… look, I’m genuinely not trying to be a sour asshole, but why did we need this? How is this furthering the development of smartphone tech? It’s, like… sure, pretty graphics are nice, but do we really need ray-tracing on our phones? (I know it’s not ray-tracing, but you get my point)
It’s what happens when they run out of useful things to improve but still need to announce something to make people think they’re getting an upgrade.
Guess this means Apple has run out of ideas on how to make iPhone better.
What can we do to distract attention away from the fact that we don’t have any decent new features?
- “Rename the business unit so we can print new letterheads and business cards?” Our customer don’t work here, sir. “Dammit!”
- “Release a new color that nobody wants? How about a light blue that is so close to the regular silver no one can tell?” We did that last year, sir. “Dammit!”
- “Oh, I know: Repeat the year 2000 mistake by naming our OS versions after the current year using only 2 digits. That will never bite us in the ass in the future.” Brilliant, sir.
It has more blur than average Hyprland rice
Gives me iOS 7 vibes.
I like it in theory, but in some of the examples they provided on https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-introduces-a-delightful-and-elegant-new-software-design/, reading text isn’t the easiest with all the colors and blurs everywhere.
Wow, that is bad. The music one is probably the worst of the examples. The artist name is barely readable most of that clip.
The notifications are rough too, a big wall of white text against a burry multicolor background is not fun to read.
reading text isn’t the easiest with all the colors and blurs everywhere
Agreed - I like the look of these things in an abstract sense, but it makes the text really hard to read. I
assumehope there’s a way to disable it in accessibility settings.Also not a fan of the critical UI elements being popped out into floating islands, very easy to accidentally hit underlying page content when there’s effectively zero padding around controls (on touch devices, as the ad companies have discovered by making the × icons smaller and smaller).
