I've recently picked up writing again, and decided to share my thoughts about what most designers (developers, tech people) have been thinking about lately: Liquid Glass. It makes sense, consistency-wise, but I wonder if it's the right direction. Let's hope Apple fixes the readability issues soon. Is this the new Windows Vista?
It's nice to have frivilous things in our life where form overtakes function. But with a GUI, it's a tool and they work best when there are no frills. Nobody makes a fancy looking hammer (looking forward to the fancy hammer replies).
All the friggin' shaders we have to run to waste GPU cycles, just to get those blobs pretending to refract light. Don't even get me started about the ever-increasing border radii!?
The transparency, blur and contrast issues are stupid but so obviously stupid that I assume they’ll be fixed. What worries me more about iOS 26 is the continuing trend of platforms being so ashamed of any visible UI that they feel the need to hide it. More ‘…’ menus everywhere, some of them only appearing after certain scroll gestures, which means tools that used to be ever-present and immediately tappable now require three gestures to activate. This desire to squash every UI down into one barely visible drop of glass isn’t ridiculous because of the glass, it’s ridiculous because UI is important. These devices have big screens and tons of pixels (not to mention hardware buttons) but somehow we only have room for the main content pane in any app. I agree with the article that skeuomorphism has gone too far, beyond mere analogy and now into the realm of completely impenetrable metaphor. Give me a brutalist UI that isn’t embarrassed to show itself. Gimme things that both explain and enable the app’s features. By all means make them shiny and lickable but please stop trying to take them away.
> The transparency, blur and contrast issues are stupid but so obviously stupid that I assume they’ll be fixed.
lol
I thought the same when ios 7 came out - hidden menus requiring multiple taps, touch targets that don't look like touch targets, small targets, terrible contrast, silly unreadable fonts, on and on...
but not only didn't this get fixed, the SAME designs leaked into the rest of the world.
for example, the tesla car UI adopted ALL the same deficiencies. Hard to read center display? critical functions that require multiple taps? all while you're driving... wow
I wholeheartedly agree. There are two great examples of this in the latest iOS beta:
In Safari, there used to be a button at the low right to reveal all the open tabs, allow, allowing you to close the current tab, or any other others using just two taps. Now you have to hit a “…” button, followed by ”all tabs”.
Also, I noticed in the podcast app there used to be a skip 15 seconds button always available at the lower right when content started playing. Perfect for avoiding those obnoxious loud ads at the very first sample of audio. Now it’s two clicks away. Incredibly frustrating.
> Give me a brutalist UI that isn’t embarrassed to show itself. Gimme things that both explain and enable the app’s features. By all means make them shiny and lickable
[...or not, according to user preference. -- my addition /CRC]
In other words, give me Windows 7. Where I could select everything from the "Classic" (Win 95/NT4/2000) via the XP to the Vista UI "themes" (and then modify to my exact preference from there).
With apps from ~the XP era, when their UIs too were still useful.
As a typeface and legibility enthusiast I obviously have my problems with it.
I've found that in the creative work I do, lots of things moved away from skeuomorphism too far. Yes it's easier to read the text on a flat black background with all the controls in a grid. but you lose some intuition compared to when it actually resembled a hardware unit that has logical places for things.
I'm in the market for a new vehicle so I'm particular interested in that last line: which companies are bringing back physical controls in cars?
Bugatti has chosen with the new Tourbillion to go for an all analog gauge + button setup. Because handcrafted gauges and buttons (these days) shows of luxury. https://www.bugatti.com/en/models/tourbillon
A flat touchscreen in a car is something that is now used in anything from a base Fiat Panda to the most expensive Mercedes S class. And it all looks cheap because visually there is little visual difference between that and a 25,- dollar AliExpress tablet.
At some point in time the luxury car brands must be getting this feedback from their customers.
I don't want skeuomorphism personally, but the problem isn't with the lack of that, it's with the lack of any consistent way to differentiate the various controls in general. Is it just a bit of text? A button? A checkbox? Who knows when it's all the same kind of flat.
Win95 was very much not skeuomorphic, but it had very strong visual cues in UI even so.
I’m glad that I hesitated and didn’t buy a Mac just before this new design. It’s really a blocker to me now because I freaking hate it and I know I can’t stand using it for every day
My question is: Given Apple is one of the most valuable companies on the planet, they can (and surely have) hired some of the best designers in the world. Articles like this one and many others are virtually sharing what we all think and every time a new beta comes out, it's strange to see some of the decisions that are made. The first beta came out and it was _very hard_ to see the lock screen if you had notifications. How was that missed? Or keep liquid glass, but don't make the text bright blue, so it's so hard to see. Or trigger frosted glass if dependent on whatever the background is? I sincerely do find designers to be in a hard position (especially having worked with so many of them in the past directly), but a lot of these things seem like novice mistakes. Maybe it's not even in the designing, it's on the QA front? I'm not even sure here. I'm by no means a designer, but I have to believe that they are testing this as much as we are internally and have been for a long time now... I'd like to believe they aren't just changing UI elements on the fly based on what X / Twitter feels is good or bad.
This problem is endemic to the industry. All mainstream operating systems have been done products for quite a while. But because full-time designers need to be designing something even when nothing in the company needs designed any more, they start redesigning existing products. And the more radical and courageous the redesign, the better for their performance review.
It doesn’t even look particularly good? And I’m not even a design-Luddite – generally a fan of a lot of Apple visual design and I hate old windows 98-style buttons. I’m the type of person who should enjoy it. (Only speaking about the visuals here)
The only wow feeling I get is the refraction effect. Like, it’s a ”novel” effect in GUIs. But when elements are still it looks the same as regular glassomorphism which we already had years ago. Buttons look totally different depending on what’s underneath, and in 90% of cases it’s messy and blurs together. The wow feeling will fade quickly, but the clutter will remain…
The only thing I like is that it makes layering a bit clearer (groupings, buttons vs indicators) compared to ultra-flat design of the last years. But that could have been achieved with subtle 3d/parallax effects, eg based on gyro.
My theory is that Apple specifically wanted an effect that can’t be replicated in webviews, to drive more devs towards native, out of FOMO for looking ”cheap”.
> It doesn’t even look particularly good? And I’m not even a design-Luddite – generally a fan of a lot of Apple visual design and I hate old windows 98-style buttons. I’m the type of person who should enjoy it. (Only speaking about the visuals here)
Same, and liquid glass so far is just...bad, in a way. I don't mind it nearly as much on the iPhone but it's particularly bad on macOS. Excessive padding, lack of clean information density. The transparent menu bar doesn't adjust text for the wallpaper, so if you set a white background you still get (now unreadable) white text, but everywhere else the text changes colors based on the background. There's not even a glass effect in the menu bar, it's just transparent.
Honestly macOS 26, still as of Beta 4, looks like a bad GNOME/GTK theme. I'm incredibly disappointed in Apple here - a company that said they would never converge their interfaces together have basically morphed macOS into iPad OS.
Meanwhile on the mobile side of things, Material 3 expressive is actually looking really nice, aesthetically and I'd prefer that but then I'm giving up all of Apple's other conveniences.
Hurray for no competition.
> My theory is that Apple specifically wanted an effect that can’t be replicated in webviews, to drive more devs towards native, out of FOMO for looking ”cheap”.
I get this vibe too - they want something that can only be made using their toolkits, drive more to the app store and that sweet sweet 30% commission.
> My theory is that Apple specifically wanted an effect that can’t be replicated in webviews
This makes a lot of sense to me. I was also under the impression that all these lighting effects would be rather computationally expensive. This could encourage people to upgrade devices and make it hard to replicate this design on other brands’ less powerful hardware.
Yesterday I dusted off my iPhone 4 that was on iOS 5 (skeuomorphic) and it was lovely to use. Like a bonehead I wiped it and let iTunes update to 7.1.2 and now it has the flat design similar to what we have today and it sucks!
> Later iOS 26 beta releases show Apple reducing transparency and adding blur effects for better readability.
This is a beta release. It is a work in progress. When iOS 7’s betas came out the reaction was similarly negative. I would suggest we wait and see what the system evolves into; by the time we get to iOS 27 I am quite sure that Apple will have found the right balance.
But so is alpha, which is where looniness gets to live without judgement. Beta is supposed to be polished and working well, except where there are explicit warnings of incomplete or sketchy functionality. I.e. small areas that are still alpha.
Which is the opposite of how Apple framed "liquid glass" in the beta.
Apple lowered the bar on its beta. Strong feedback is how customers suggest a course correction at a higher level.
Ah. So they're reducing transparency to get better readability... If reducing transparency increases readability, then wouldn't the best readability occur at zero transparency?
Readability is obviously good for something. Is transparency?
I am quite sure that "the right balance" is zero transparency, but only about 99% sure Apple won't "find" that.
> Instead, it introduces readability problems without any of the spatial computing benefits.
> Apple's Liquid Glass may win design accolades, but history suggests it will join the long list of beautiful solutions that made computing harder, not easier, for the people who actually have to use it every day. Unless they get it right.
> Early signs suggest they're already realizing this.
Succinctly written.
How can the third most valuable company on the planet with computing being the core of their DNA not realize this pre launch?
I have no experience with either SF/ SV or culture in large US enterprises.
>How can the third most valuable company on the planet with computing being the core of their DNA not realize this pre launch?
Large companies have lots of mediocre people making decisions and the larger a company is the further away those decision makers are from the experts that can guide them towards making the correct decision.
The recent big new initiatives by Apple has been all kind of failure? Apple Intelligence, Apple Vision, now this?
I don't know. I don't want to be doomsdayer because even during its heyday Apple made lot of mistakes - remember Ping? - but they never felt like this.
It seems that many people criticising transparency also think that it does make sense in AR. I never understood why.
AR is old. We have things like street signs, road markings, advertising and all sorts of other signage. Almost none of it is transparent, and why would it be?
No one can focus on a thing and what's behind it at the same time. There is no correct level of blur to fix this (but I'm sure they are going to spend years trying to find it anyway).
What I would like to be able to do sometimes is to make something transparent when it's blocking my view. It shouldn't be semi-transparent or blurred. It should be a faint wireframe outline so I know that something is there.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 57.9 ms ] threadThey won't be fixed. At least not quickly, and not easily.
Because Liquid Glass is literally not designed to be fixed, and has literally never been tested in real conditions.
We've seen that with Apple's flailing in the first few betas
lol
I thought the same when ios 7 came out - hidden menus requiring multiple taps, touch targets that don't look like touch targets, small targets, terrible contrast, silly unreadable fonts, on and on...
but not only didn't this get fixed, the SAME designs leaked into the rest of the world.
for example, the tesla car UI adopted ALL the same deficiencies. Hard to read center display? critical functions that require multiple taps? all while you're driving... wow
sigh
In Safari, there used to be a button at the low right to reveal all the open tabs, allow, allowing you to close the current tab, or any other others using just two taps. Now you have to hit a “…” button, followed by ”all tabs”.
Also, I noticed in the podcast app there used to be a skip 15 seconds button always available at the lower right when content started playing. Perfect for avoiding those obnoxious loud ads at the very first sample of audio. Now it’s two clicks away. Incredibly frustrating.
[...or not, according to user preference. -- my addition /CRC]
In other words, give me Windows 7. Where I could select everything from the "Classic" (Win 95/NT4/2000) via the XP to the Vista UI "themes" (and then modify to my exact preference from there).
With apps from ~the XP era, when their UIs too were still useful.
I've found that in the creative work I do, lots of things moved away from skeuomorphism too far. Yes it's easier to read the text on a flat black background with all the controls in a grid. but you lose some intuition compared to when it actually resembled a hardware unit that has logical places for things.
I'm in the market for a new vehicle so I'm particular interested in that last line: which companies are bringing back physical controls in cars?
A flat touchscreen in a car is something that is now used in anything from a base Fiat Panda to the most expensive Mercedes S class. And it all looks cheap because visually there is little visual difference between that and a 25,- dollar AliExpress tablet.
At some point in time the luxury car brands must be getting this feedback from their customers.
Win95 was very much not skeuomorphic, but it had very strong visual cues in UI even so.
The only wow feeling I get is the refraction effect. Like, it’s a ”novel” effect in GUIs. But when elements are still it looks the same as regular glassomorphism which we already had years ago. Buttons look totally different depending on what’s underneath, and in 90% of cases it’s messy and blurs together. The wow feeling will fade quickly, but the clutter will remain…
The only thing I like is that it makes layering a bit clearer (groupings, buttons vs indicators) compared to ultra-flat design of the last years. But that could have been achieved with subtle 3d/parallax effects, eg based on gyro.
My theory is that Apple specifically wanted an effect that can’t be replicated in webviews, to drive more devs towards native, out of FOMO for looking ”cheap”.
Same, and liquid glass so far is just...bad, in a way. I don't mind it nearly as much on the iPhone but it's particularly bad on macOS. Excessive padding, lack of clean information density. The transparent menu bar doesn't adjust text for the wallpaper, so if you set a white background you still get (now unreadable) white text, but everywhere else the text changes colors based on the background. There's not even a glass effect in the menu bar, it's just transparent.
Honestly macOS 26, still as of Beta 4, looks like a bad GNOME/GTK theme. I'm incredibly disappointed in Apple here - a company that said they would never converge their interfaces together have basically morphed macOS into iPad OS.
Meanwhile on the mobile side of things, Material 3 expressive is actually looking really nice, aesthetically and I'd prefer that but then I'm giving up all of Apple's other conveniences.
Hurray for no competition.
> My theory is that Apple specifically wanted an effect that can’t be replicated in webviews, to drive more devs towards native, out of FOMO for looking ”cheap”.
I get this vibe too - they want something that can only be made using their toolkits, drive more to the app store and that sweet sweet 30% commission.
This makes a lot of sense to me. I was also under the impression that all these lighting effects would be rather computationally expensive. This could encourage people to upgrade devices and make it hard to replicate this design on other brands’ less powerful hardware.
- they add a new menu view
- the menu views design get updated
When you run out of menus to add you’re left with design updates for the sake of design updates.
> Later iOS 26 beta releases show Apple reducing transparency and adding blur effects for better readability.
This is a beta release. It is a work in progress. When iOS 7’s betas came out the reaction was similarly negative. I would suggest we wait and see what the system evolves into; by the time we get to iOS 27 I am quite sure that Apple will have found the right balance.
But so is alpha, which is where looniness gets to live without judgement. Beta is supposed to be polished and working well, except where there are explicit warnings of incomplete or sketchy functionality. I.e. small areas that are still alpha.
Which is the opposite of how Apple framed "liquid glass" in the beta.
Apple lowered the bar on its beta. Strong feedback is how customers suggest a course correction at a higher level.
Readability is obviously good for something. Is transparency?
I am quite sure that "the right balance" is zero transparency, but only about 99% sure Apple won't "find" that.
> Apple's Liquid Glass may win design accolades, but history suggests it will join the long list of beautiful solutions that made computing harder, not easier, for the people who actually have to use it every day. Unless they get it right.
> Early signs suggest they're already realizing this.
Succinctly written.
How can the third most valuable company on the planet with computing being the core of their DNA not realize this pre launch?
I have no experience with either SF/ SV or culture in large US enterprises.
Does someone has a hypothesis?
Large companies have lots of mediocre people making decisions and the larger a company is the further away those decision makers are from the experts that can guide them towards making the correct decision.
I don't know. I don't want to be doomsdayer because even during its heyday Apple made lot of mistakes - remember Ping? - but they never felt like this.
I mean, are they trying to make the phone UI so bad that people finally give up and say “well I might as well get the goggles cause the phone sucks”?
AR is old. We have things like street signs, road markings, advertising and all sorts of other signage. Almost none of it is transparent, and why would it be?
No one can focus on a thing and what's behind it at the same time. There is no correct level of blur to fix this (but I'm sure they are going to spend years trying to find it anyway).
What I would like to be able to do sometimes is to make something transparent when it's blocking my view. It shouldn't be semi-transparent or blurred. It should be a faint wireframe outline so I know that something is there.