I hope this signals a move away from Liquid Glass. It's an absolutely awful design. Android has enough of its own problems that I'm not in a rush to switch, but I'm really not happy at all with this new design direction Apple has taken.
I've been working on UI/UX design since 2012, and have witnessed several major shifts in design styles.
I clearly remember the release of iOS7 (or maybe I'm mistaken) with its flat design in the summer of 2013. Users accustomed to the skeuomorphic style for years initially felt this change was terrible. However, within two months, people adapted to the change, and other companies' design teams were quickly following suit.
But this time is different. Even though Liquid Glass has been around for quite some time, looking at the screen on my Mac still makes me feeling unacceptable.
Flat design was always atrocious, in that it utterly fails to take advantage of our visualization systems extremely effective autonomous recognition and interpretation of any 3D cue at all.
Not meaning we need things to look gratuitously 3D. But that small amounts of 3D effect, edges, shadows and highlighting, greatly reduce the effort of "seeing" what is where and what it means.
And of course, the trend to simply use text for text, buttons, links, ... without very high standards and consistency of differentiation, is truly horrible design.
> I clearly remember the release of iOS7 (or maybe I'm mistaken) with its flat design in the summer of 2013. Users accustomed to the skeuomorphic style for years initially felt this change was terrible.
For the record (not that I'm in any position of note or have any real impact on any of this): I _liked_ iOS7's flat design. It felt to me like it got quite close to its intention: to highlight content, and withdraw the UI only to the bare minimum to get stuff done. It was sparse and clear enough that I didn't think about much. There were some "rules" that apps applied inconsistently (or couldn't actually be rules anyone could follow), such as where the primary action button should be (the "back" button was pretty obvious, but the "new"/"next"/"go"/"submit" would move around all three of the other corners depending on app - maybe there's no one-size-fits-all solution for that.
Sure, it lacked discoverability. I don't have a ready solution that solves for the "content-first" and "discoverable options" that I can offer.
But the flatness, the tidy icons, the slide-over layers that were at sensible and consistent illusions of height above one another all "worked" for me.
Great for apple. Great for Meta, in that hopefully it destroys meta.
Really great time for an UI change, with governments banning the thing. If they want people to go to the effort of using a VPN to access meta, they should make it better, not worse.
The real news is that he is being replaced with Steve Lemay, one of the most OG interaction designers at Apple.
Not someone with a marketing or packaging design background; someone who sweats over pixels and knows what "discoverability" and "affordance" and "feedback" and all those dirty human factors words mean.
I really don't understand how liquid glass on Mac OS made it past quality control. It is truly awful. The worst desktop UX I have ever seen, maybe ever. They should just roll back most of the changes to the interface
Hilarious that every single comment is "Good. Apple's design sense is bad" and not him moving to Meta which will presumably make them b- I mean even worse than they are now
Of course, that’s mostly because there are bigger problems this release cycle. For instance, they didn’t test Magnifier on 13 mini sized screens. Now that it doesn’t fit, the other app teams will probably make more stuff uselessly cluttered/embiggened, rendering Apple’s last phone-size devices useless.
Liquid Glass is actually very good design that addresses design problems that persisted since the switch to touchscreens in a very comprehensive way.
More specifically, the problem of how to have universally recognizable and standardized UI controls in every app without interfering with their design identity.
To me it’s just a logical conclusion in the UI design field, and I fully expect Google and others to adopt something like it eventually.
The implementation isn’t flawless though.
I’d love if an actual UX designer could comment here.
Liquid Glass is hot garbage. I updated and kept thinking it would grow on me, no I just hate it. UI is hidden behind extra taps (the stupid new tab bar) and for the first time in my memory I've clicked, seen the animation of my click, and nothing has happened. Not to be a jerk but that's Android-level-shit (and yes, I've personally experienced that countless times in Android or Android-based OSes, like in the Meta Quest).
No one wants to see their content behind controls, they want to see the controls. The stupid glassy circles over my video are just distracting and literally make it harder for me to see the controls.
Just today I was scrolling and getting increasingly frustrated with the glass header flip/flopping between white/black text to account for the content under. For what??? I can't actually _see_ the content, it's warped and half-hidden.
Honestly, whoever thought "Hey, let's make things like the Safari address bar not cover the bottom so you can 'see your content'" should be fired (and I try not to say that often). It was a stupid idea, oh look now I can see 10px more of "content" that is just distracting and stealing space from useful controls. All the padding/margins got bigger in Liquid Glass all while reducing visibility and removing functionality.
Liquid Glass will go down as "Look over there" (re: AI), it was a distraction at best (because if people actually thought it was an improvement they are blind). Hopefully we don't have to wait quite as long as we did after iOS 7 for them to reverse course.
My turn to complain about bugs. I used to balk at people when they complained about bugs on MacOS/iOS.
My iPhone 7 which I used for 7 years straight, was more bug-free than my current iPhone 15 Pro.
There’s no shortage of visual bugs with iOS 26, but that’s not my point. Recently I had to restart my phone (literally unheard of in Apple land) because I put it in Guided Access and it wasn’t possible to get it out without a force restart, which I had to learn how to do for the first time. That bug persisted for at least a month.
A few days ago the camera app would just show a grey screen and the fix was to restart your iPhone.
I’m sorry but that’s Android. If you have to restart your phone because of a bug, or core functionality like camera doesn’t work, you are not using an iPhone. But apparently, you are, and apparently Apple has finally succumbed to organizational corruption like every other company.
Still miles better than Android though, in which the OS is still an active warzone between Google and the manufacturer.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 64.0 ms ] threadI'm still too locked in to consider switching, but my eye is on the door if this keeps up.
I clearly remember the release of iOS7 (or maybe I'm mistaken) with its flat design in the summer of 2013. Users accustomed to the skeuomorphic style for years initially felt this change was terrible. However, within two months, people adapted to the change, and other companies' design teams were quickly following suit.
But this time is different. Even though Liquid Glass has been around for quite some time, looking at the screen on my Mac still makes me feeling unacceptable.
Not meaning we need things to look gratuitously 3D. But that small amounts of 3D effect, edges, shadows and highlighting, greatly reduce the effort of "seeing" what is where and what it means.
And of course, the trend to simply use text for text, buttons, links, ... without very high standards and consistency of differentiation, is truly horrible design.
For the record (not that I'm in any position of note or have any real impact on any of this): I _liked_ iOS7's flat design. It felt to me like it got quite close to its intention: to highlight content, and withdraw the UI only to the bare minimum to get stuff done. It was sparse and clear enough that I didn't think about much. There were some "rules" that apps applied inconsistently (or couldn't actually be rules anyone could follow), such as where the primary action button should be (the "back" button was pretty obvious, but the "new"/"next"/"go"/"submit" would move around all three of the other corners depending on app - maybe there's no one-size-fits-all solution for that.
Sure, it lacked discoverability. I don't have a ready solution that solves for the "content-first" and "discoverable options" that I can offer.
But the flatness, the tidy icons, the slide-over layers that were at sensible and consistent illusions of height above one another all "worked" for me.
Really great time for an UI change, with governments banning the thing. If they want people to go to the effort of using a VPN to access meta, they should make it better, not worse.
The real news is that he is being replaced with Steve Lemay, one of the most OG interaction designers at Apple.
Not someone with a marketing or packaging design background; someone who sweats over pixels and knows what "discoverability" and "affordance" and "feedback" and all those dirty human factors words mean.
https://patents.google.com/?inventor=stephen+lemay
I don’t really mind liquid glass.
Of course, that’s mostly because there are bigger problems this release cycle. For instance, they didn’t test Magnifier on 13 mini sized screens. Now that it doesn’t fit, the other app teams will probably make more stuff uselessly cluttered/embiggened, rendering Apple’s last phone-size devices useless.
Liquid Glass is actually very good design that addresses design problems that persisted since the switch to touchscreens in a very comprehensive way.
More specifically, the problem of how to have universally recognizable and standardized UI controls in every app without interfering with their design identity.
To me it’s just a logical conclusion in the UI design field, and I fully expect Google and others to adopt something like it eventually.
The implementation isn’t flawless though.
I’d love if an actual UX designer could comment here.
No one wants to see their content behind controls, they want to see the controls. The stupid glassy circles over my video are just distracting and literally make it harder for me to see the controls.
Just today I was scrolling and getting increasingly frustrated with the glass header flip/flopping between white/black text to account for the content under. For what??? I can't actually _see_ the content, it's warped and half-hidden.
Honestly, whoever thought "Hey, let's make things like the Safari address bar not cover the bottom so you can 'see your content'" should be fired (and I try not to say that often). It was a stupid idea, oh look now I can see 10px more of "content" that is just distracting and stealing space from useful controls. All the padding/margins got bigger in Liquid Glass all while reducing visibility and removing functionality.
Liquid Glass will go down as "Look over there" (re: AI), it was a distraction at best (because if people actually thought it was an improvement they are blind). Hopefully we don't have to wait quite as long as we did after iOS 7 for them to reverse course.
My iPhone 7 which I used for 7 years straight, was more bug-free than my current iPhone 15 Pro.
There’s no shortage of visual bugs with iOS 26, but that’s not my point. Recently I had to restart my phone (literally unheard of in Apple land) because I put it in Guided Access and it wasn’t possible to get it out without a force restart, which I had to learn how to do for the first time. That bug persisted for at least a month.
A few days ago the camera app would just show a grey screen and the fix was to restart your iPhone.
I’m sorry but that’s Android. If you have to restart your phone because of a bug, or core functionality like camera doesn’t work, you are not using an iPhone. But apparently, you are, and apparently Apple has finally succumbed to organizational corruption like every other company.
Still miles better than Android though, in which the OS is still an active warzone between Google and the manufacturer.