Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

> The team who designed it should be fired and replaced with people who priorities a professional appearance and usability.

Eh, I disagree about who should be fired. The designers and implementers are not (necessarily) the ones who decided it was their job. As far as I know, and probably depending on department, Apple internally works in annual cycles and sort of decides what the mission is up front. Any designer or engineer voluntarily taking on what was probably the inane grandiose idea of a higher-up should be commended for their ambition even if they knew it wouldn't go. More likely (imo) people are working on what the company has decided they work on, and the people trying to make it work are grinding themselves down in service of that goal and keeping their jobs in a crazy economic time.

Scott Forstall was the one to be fired for having basically bad taste with regard to iOS6 (as far as people knew outside the company), which was the right move if anyone was to be.

In this case, it's whoever made the call to try and overhaul multiple OS' in this way in the span of probably a year or two, and who clearly didn't prepare sufficient escape hatches or internal feedback mechanisms for the project. The people working on it are just working on it, and sometimes you gotta grit your teeth and try to make something happen that every part of you knows won't happen.

As an analogy, any iOS or Mac developer knows XCode sucks, but we shouldn't go calling for the XCode team to be fired, because the current team are basically the museum curators and it would be stupid to try and overhaul a 20-30 year old insanely complex critical piece of infrastructure like that in any short period of time without massively disrupting everyone who relies on those tools. Improvements and refactors need to be relatively conservative from an end user's perspective, and aligned with business goals from the company's perspective. To fire them would imply they're actively deciding not to make it better at the lowest levels, but it's doubtful to me that they have the power, time, or resources allocated to them to do that. If they were to be given the go-ahead to do that, they'd probably at best produce as effective of a result as the team who were tasked with redesigning all of the OS' this year and given no way around launching it in alpha. In that case, it would be more fruitful to be mad that Apple isn't investing in a better newer alternative development experience or editor while XCode chugs along, and likewise with OS26, we should be vocally annoyed at the initiative, timeline, and arrogance of releasing it in this state, but the team is probably doing their best at this point to incrementally improve what is probably to them a failed project on a massive scale that they didn't likely have much of an option to commit themselves to.

Aren't betas over?

This is the full release version ios26 which we will be living with for at least one year

The glass style for iOS app icons is completely idiotic. It's optional though. It doesn't even look good, it just makes the home screen look a little less crowded, but the UX is horrible.

Especially widgets are really bad. The widget for my car shows the battery level as a bar chart. During charging it's green, if there is a charging error it's red, when parked it's white/gray. In the glass mode I need to look really hard to see what's happening. All the color coded information is gone. Same for my todo list widget, due items are orange, long overdue items are red. With glass mode on they all look the same.

Thanks, that’s very good to know. I was actually eyeing the new AirPods, and it didn’t even occur to me that their functionality is tied to the iOS version. Now they’ve become just another thing to skip.

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