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Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

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221–230 of 538 posts

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

#221
After 16 years of using exclusively iPhones, barring a few months with Windows Phone 7 and 1 week with a Samsung phone a decade ago, I’m almost certainly moving over to Android with my next phone purchase.

There’s very little Apple can do to prevent that at this point because the way Apple operates, with its hardware only running its own software and its software only running largely on its own hardware, it requires a tremendous amount of trust on my part to use Apple. Trust that they won’t screw me over.

But at this point the pot has boiled over. At least Android allows me to mitigate the damage by switching over to a different phone manufacturer altogether (if not changing the software experience on my existing phone dramatically).

Being in the Apple ecosystem leaves one with no such escape hatch.

Right now besides the M and A series of processors it’s hard to tell if there’s anything in the Apple stable that is genuinely superior for my actual life.

Something as simple as the Android ability to pin live scores for games on your screen across apps makes a much greater positive difference to my life than anything iOS 26 appears to have (other than maybe better spam call screening…something Androidnhas had for years).

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

#222
post #164

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…

The trouble with Reduce Transparency on iOS 26 is that it also reduces contrast (irrespective of Increase Contrast).

That's absolutely wild.

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

#223

I might be the only one who actually really likes the Liquid Glass? Its made my 12 pro max noticeably laggier though, which I'm definitely not a fan of..

No you aren't, I like it too. I did notice some slowdown with my iPhone 14 in low battery mode though, which is a shame but not unexpected.

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

#225
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.

I think this depends on the context.

If the only way I interact with a service is a single app then I want that app to blend into my phone. I don't care if the Uber app on Android and iOS are the same, I only see one of them. If I have to use a service on many different platforms, I sometimes prefer having a consistent design language, e.g. I like that Slack has a consistent sidebar interface everywhere. I want to go from the browser to tablet to phone and not have anything in a different spot.

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

#226

iOS/macos 26 have me feeling isolated in a way I’ve never experienced in tech. Aesthetics aside (which I personally don’t like, but I can accept as subjective) I see extreme issues and regressions literally everywhere, from not being able to read the notifications in a half pulled curtain to memory leaks in half the native apps. Yet no one is raising their voice in the tech world. No bloggers, no YouTubers, nothing t…

If you head over to digital artistry-related subreddits / other forums, they are almost uniformly very strongly against this due to the major UX regressions in iPadOS for their typical use cases (i.e. touch-based multitasking having been ruined)

But yes agreed, it is mind-boggling to me how broadly well-received this has been

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

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I'm just not someone with strong feelings about UX consistency or appearance, and tend to focus on functionality. But this...this feels like a symptom of something fundamental inside Apple going wrong.

The only time before this I've felt like Apple took a huge UX or appearance dive on an OS upgrade was iOS6 -> iOS7. People complain about almost every macOS upgrade, but the closest they've come to bothering me is that I hated the new tab styles in desktop Safari they introduced a while ago, but that was configurable so I just set it back to normal and that was that. I've disliked other things (the Touch Bar was neve…

Heh, I submitted a complaint with Apple every day until they reverted those Safari tab styles. Awful design. There is something deeply broken inside Apple allowing these broken, awful designs get out.

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

#228
I like it, but regardless of one's aesthetic opinions I think an important thing people are missing is the move towards UI elements being overlays on top of content instead of sandwiching or interleaving with content. This is very apparent on some apps like iOS Safari, Maps, etc. The general idea is your app content is a full screen/window canvas and your UI sits on top of it, which allows it to get out of the way of the content. I actually really like this move. The transparency serves a purpose here, it helps retain that full size appearance even when UI elements are visible. The glass effects essentially serve as a way to generate some contrast while still making the underlying content visible. Even with large UI elements on screen like sidebars, you still get the feeling that the content is prominent. I think this is going to influence how I build my own web ui's moving forward.

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

#229
post #145
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

I'm not surprised since I think most UI overhauls replace one system with another that is roughly equally good, except that nobody is familiar with the new system so everyone burns a bunch of time and attention learning the new one just to get back to par. The new UI often isn't worse in any objective sense, it's just not better and the whole exercise is a giant waste of everyone's time. Some subset of users like re-…

I think a lot of the time the UI is objectively worse. Less functionality, more clicks/swipes to do the same actions, less legibility, etc.

It's just that people get used to bad software.

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

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it even possible?

It was, but Apple is no longer signing the old releases. ( https://ipsw.me/iPhone14,4 ). I downgraded about 10 minutes after trying iOS 26. Sorry to all who missed the window.

I'm still on 17.7.2, hoping for a jailbreak one day...
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