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Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

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Re: Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

#311

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

bavent wrote: post #296
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the issues is almost certainly that the app developers didn't add the UIDesignRequiresCompatibility = YES [0] item to the Info.plist. Set that, and it doesn't use Liquid Glass in your app. I set it for all my apps. One was designed by a professional designer, who absolutely defecated masonry, when I showed him what it did to our app. I'm worried that Apple may end up ignoring that flag, and will force us to us…

I’m referring entirely to built-in Apple apps - Mail, Messages, etc. The in-house apps can’t even get it right, which to me means: - devs are so siloed, nobody knows what’s going on - product is not communicating anything outside of individual fiefdoms - there is zero QA testing - no designers are actually signing off on the final results …which all seem pretty typical for a large bureaucracy, I guess I just had high…

A lot of them are SwiftUI apps.

I feel that SwiftUI is not ripe. I use it for one of my apps (I have to, in order to use the charts), but it’s too limited to use for anything else.

Re: Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

#312

Post by eschaton »

bigyabai wrote: post #279
mckn1ght wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> taking the time to make a sexy native UI It takes much more time to make your own custom UI, and then fix it every major update that breaks it somehow. You can get a nice looking UI by just using stock components with minimal configuration and then you basically get platform UI refreshes for free.

If you're starting from the perspective of a native app developer, you're absolutely correct. However, most startups are going to be websites/Electron/CEF apps. It's much easier and cheaper to write-once-ship-everywhere with an ugly React UI than it is to jump through the hoops of writing special-snowflake versions for every OS under the sun. It's basically negligent to insist on native apps, if profitability is your…

It depends who your application is for. You obviously think building an application is about maximizing your profit, and your users are just a means to achieve that. If you were approaching your application from a “what’s best for my users” angle you might make different choices.

Re: Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

#313

Post by alsetmusic »

porcoda wrote: post #31

This update is one of the rare cases where I really dislike the new version. I’m usually happy with Apple updates, even ones the commentators dislike. This time I’m sorta agreeing with them: I don’t like the new iOS. Same with the Mac and iPad: other than being glitchy, I just don’t like the changes. It feels like my screen real estate isn’t as efficiently used, UI elements feel jumbled and the transparency makes thi…

This article gave me hope that when I finally have to upgrade my Mac to keep up with system requirements for software updates on third-party apps, maybe I won't hate it as much as I expected to. It's a mess, but the screenshots in this article give me hope that it doesn't have to be a complete and total disaster.

[0] How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface:

0: https://tidbits.com/2025/10/09/how-to-turn-liquid-glass-into...

Re: Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

#315

Post by bicx »

eschaton wrote: post #211
bicx wrote: post #79

2025 feels like a cardinal year for top-down decisions we all just have to endure for the present. The best we can do is bitch loudly and often, and hope the people at the top still feel threatened by consumers/constituents. This Liquid Glass decision is particularly challenging for my tiny startup. We have multiple platforms including iOS and Android. I was hoping to share much of our design language across iOS and…

You were wrong to even attempt to share design language across platforms. You should make your applications good native citizens if you have any respect for your users, because yours isn’t the only software they use.

That’s a pretty bold statement. Look at the most popular apps, and you will see across Android and iOS that the designs across platforms are more similar than they are different. We only have 2 engineers right now, but we still maintain clean native implementations for navigation, interactions, and areas where native UI excels. Neither our Android or iOS apps appear as if we just copy-pasted from one platform to the other. Both Android and iOS had been leaning into flat design for years, so it was easy to adapt the same design language for our brand across both. Not so with this return of skeuomorphic design.

Re: Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

#316

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

ebbi wrote: post #274

I like Liquid Glass on the whole (I will state upfront I have no accessibility issues so I know I'm speaking from my little corner). Putting aside the fact that, yes, there are a few issues with the way Liquid Glass is implemented currently (nothing that can't be iterated on over the next few releases), I will say that some of the critics use really silly examples to prove their point. The messages screenshot would h…

I agree. I think that the criticisms on legibility are extremely biased. In my experience, the real issues with Liquid Glass are in terms of decreased usable space, less discoverability of actions that were previously top-level, and most importantly (and rather objectively), battery life.

I started off thinking that the design was ugly (the reflections made it look kinda plastic) but came to like the fluidity after about a month. And I like the push away from custom fonts and colors, which software designers obsess way too much upon.

Re: Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

#317

Post by stordoff »

frereubu wrote: post #136

I don't have accessibility issues, but even so I've been a fan of these settings for a few iOS versions now: Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Reduce Transparency Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Increase Contrast Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Differentiate Without Colour Settings > Accessibility > Motion > Reduce Motion Settings > Accessibility > Motion > Prefer Cros…

Reduce Transparency helps in some ways, but also introduces its own issues. A couple I noticed in the brief time I used it:

* My home screen wallpaper is a blurred version of the astronomy lock screen. After enabling Reduce Transparency, it remains working for ten minutes or so, then gets replaced with a plain black background.

* Websites have a large bottom margin (usually white, sometimes site specific colours) where the toolbar appears if you scroll up. It feels like a complete waste of screen space if you're scrolling down a webpage to read it.

Tested on an iPhone 16 Pro Max 256GB.

Re: Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

#318

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

dash2 wrote: post #262
id00 wrote: post #72

All these threads about iOS 26 reminded me about something long forgotten like... the release of iOS I suggest to check the comments in this 12 years old thread [1], replace version number 7 with 26 there and realise that some things never change [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5856398

Actually about half of the top comments there are positive. Opinion was clearly divided. Not now though!

Do you think that this thread is representative of Apple’s user base?

Re: Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

#319

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

torben-friis wrote: post #248
nomel wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see extreme issues and regressions literally everywhere I would claim this is mostly unrelated to 26, and more related to .0. All the tech people that I know, who have experience with Apple OS releases, wait until .1 release to upgrade, for this reason. .0 are always a shit-show, since my first Apple device over 10 years ago. I see .0 as a public beta, and that's what I expect whenever I do decide to install them…

.0 releases tend to have certain bugs, but not to this degree. I've actually been part of public betas for many years, and this is the only one where I've felt launch day approach with growing concern, as it was clear nothing was remotely close to shippable. There wasn't even a clear direction, as most of the fixes have just been reducing glass around the UI, and it's very telling that the only way they've found so f…

Are you talking about bugs to mean broken functionality or design you dislike? I’m not sure I noticed broken functionality anywhere
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