> the theory that Liquid Glass is an attempt to distract customers from iOS 26’s lack of long-promised AI features
How can anyone write that with a straight face?
A design system like this takes at least a year, probably more like zero or three years. It’s not something you do at the last minute to “distract” from other feature teams’ failures.
I personally think Liquid Glass is promising but flawed, but there is zero chance Apple’s UX designers were given a brief “distract from the lack of AI progress”.
For all its flaws, it is very deeply thought out. This is not a rushed project on a whim.
My biggest issue with iOS 26 is not the UI (it’s subpar compared to prior work), but the fact that it drains my battery 2x faster than before and I’m with an iPhone 16 Pro. That’s unacceptable performance degradation on a 1-year old phone.
I think honestly they are just building in public. All those issues are with bugs in the current implementation not with the Liquid Glass "design language" itself.
(OK wow it autocapitalizes it lol).
I mean is it slow? Yes, currently. Does it have many bugs and glitches? Yes, currently. But does it look fresh? It does thats why Xiaomi etc are already copying it.
Why should the biggest company have to build in public?
Because it's how it performs in a mimetic environment not just with beta testers.
Instead this author just assumes they ship the initial version completely bug free.
I see so many people complaining, but I'm sure they will improve the reduce transparency mode quite a bit, maybe make the glass look blurry without the underlying reflections and in a couple years nobody is gonna want the old thing back, just like how all IOS7 complaints slowly faded.
I actually like it. There are glitches and various issues, but it still feels solid and something that Apple would do, not Microsoft with Vista. Looks like something funky and a breath of fresh air compared with all the boring flat designs that took over everything.
you need an expert to write that?
Whoever thought: "lets take away things that work and are easy, and replace them with things that look nice" I hope they burn in hell.
It's such a downgrade without any real value. Its not faster, its not more intuitive, its just more shiny
Apple is split between being this poppy, fresh company for the creative, as they were with their skeuomorphic designs and a more security savvy crowd with their new marketing bent towards organizations now that windows is less than reliable. Perhaps this was the right move for their consumer-bent OSses like ipados or ios, but there's a reason most enterprise companies used windows 7/vista with the boxy classic themes.
My main issue with iOS 26 is too much (unnecessary) animation and the fact that as you scroll, the buttons at the bottom of the page change.
I think that's what the article refers to when it mentions lack of predictability. On iOS 17 I can scroll and use muscle memory to tap on any of the buttons down the page. But with iOS 26 I must be careful because the buttons either merge or change location and size...
Do the people designing these interfaces not have parents/grandparents? How anyone over 50 can even see well enough to use many of these interfaces is a mystery to me. Increasing the text size usually makes the interface even more difficult to use.
As someone that loves Liquid Glass but acknowledges there are a few issues with it, I had to take the NN Group article a bit less seriously when one of their examples was the iMessage screenshot with the busy background. That would have looked illegible in any UI design system!
Also some of the examples showing blurred text behind a UI element in an area where the user wouldn't even be reading from - in previous iOS variants it would have just been a solid bar without being able to see anything. The way I take that UI decision is to show the user that there is more to see when scrolling (and to me it looks kinda cool too!).
But there are lots that need to be fixed, for sure. Tahoe annoys me with the larger rounded window corners and the UI elements in Safari seems to take way more space.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 33.6 ms ] threadCan mods change the linked article away from the thin blog post?
How can anyone write that with a straight face?
A design system like this takes at least a year, probably more like zero or three years. It’s not something you do at the last minute to “distract” from other feature teams’ failures.
I personally think Liquid Glass is promising but flawed, but there is zero chance Apple’s UX designers were given a brief “distract from the lack of AI progress”.
For all its flaws, it is very deeply thought out. This is not a rushed project on a whim.
I think that's what the article refers to when it mentions lack of predictability. On iOS 17 I can scroll and use muscle memory to tap on any of the buttons down the page. But with iOS 26 I must be careful because the buttons either merge or change location and size...
Also some of the examples showing blurred text behind a UI element in an area where the user wouldn't even be reading from - in previous iOS variants it would have just been a solid bar without being able to see anything. The way I take that UI decision is to show the user that there is more to see when scrolling (and to me it looks kinda cool too!).
But there are lots that need to be fixed, for sure. Tahoe annoys me with the larger rounded window corners and the UI elements in Safari seems to take way more space.