Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

Goodn't

Aesthetic glitches are everywhere, though it’s hard to tell when behavior is intended. Can you read the context of my texts? https://ibb.co/mVbVpYCD

The most glaring non aesthetic ones are memory leaks affecting native macOS apps, missed alarms and a very frequent one for iOS where unlocking the phone leads to an empty screen.

I also have one in safari where what seems like a misplaced dark fade covers the top third of the screen. The safari url bar tends to show empty or reappear wrongly as well.

I love the update. OS looks super nice and fresh. I love playing around with it and interacting with the glassy elements.

Don't care what some ulta-rationale pixelpushers are trying to tell me. There is nothing in my day-to-day interactions with the phone that got degraded, but many things are more fun now.

I guess that's one good thing about being blind, nothing's really changed much for us.

I think this idealism reveals a naive viewpoint about what users really care about. They care that apps work - that they do what they're supposed to and do it fast or efficiently. Not even Microsoft makes apps for their own platform that are native apps (example Teams, the new Outlook), and they service millions of users. Indeed, if you look at Microsoft's UI over the years, they are inconsistent as hell (all of the Office apps throughout the years is a good example), but so long as performance, functionality and usability hasn't suffered too much, users are OK with non-native apps that do not appear native. Another example is iTunes on Windows - looks nothing like a native Windows app.

There's also the fact that having control over your own apps UI/design language is better over the long term. What if Apple decides to ditch this liquid glass for something else years in the future? They ditched their own design language in iOS7, and now with iOS26 they've done it again.

And the basis for UI redesigns as wide ranging as this are almost entirely nonsensical. Does liquid glass suddenly improve usability by whatever percent? Nope - I guarantee Apple does NOT interrogate or benchmark their UI designs in the same way as NN Group does. Usability is actually hurt by the fact users need to re-learn basic interactions, and existing ones are now slower. Is overall performance improved over the previous version? Absolutely not - performance metrics such as battery life and UI responsiveness have regressed with the over use of visual effects like translucency and minute pixel manipulations. Why bother following changes to a design language when they are not based on real reasoning backed up by actual data or solid logic, and they end up regressing performance to an even worse state? Why should any app vendor be obligated to follow what are ultimately arbitrary and whimsical changes?

Redesigns such as this result in literally more work for the sake of it, zero net improvements and whole lot of wasted effort, all for what? Just to look different for a while, until the next redesign?