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Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

nngroup.com

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

#441

Post by MarkBagh »

After reading NN/g's iOS 26 critique, I'm sitting here staring at my trading app's deliberately boring UI and feeling... vindicated?

ImBuilding a desktop app where users monitor live trades. Originally planned glassmorphic overlays because they look incredible in mockups. Scrapped it after showing a trader friend.

His reaction: "Dude, I need to read a stop-loss alert through this? While watching a $5k position move against me? Make it BORING."

So I did. Solid backgrounds. No animations on critical buttons. Navigation that never moves. Zero transparency effects.

The problem: It photographs terribly. Product Hunt launch will look dated compared to Liquid Glass competitors.

But here's what I'm wondering:

Is Apple's Liquid Glass actually a gift to indie devs?

Hear me out:

Big Tech optimizes for launch day virality (they can afford the retention hit)

Indie devs MUST optimize for retention (we can't afford user acquisition costs)

If users get trained to expect "pretty but frustrating" from Apple...

...suddenly "boring but predictable" becomes our competitive advantage?

My hypothesis: In 6 months, "Works like iOS 25" will be a feature, not a bug.

What would you do?

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

#442

Post by Zababa »

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.

I don't think that's true. First line of respect is good UI/UX, second line of respect is being fast/not being slow, third might be being coherent with the rest of the apps on that platform.

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

#443

Post by Zababa »

eschaton wrote: post #312
bigyabai wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's best for the users is often more "having the web app and app being the same" than "having it be different on every platform".

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

#444

Post by hkpack »

roxolotl wrote: post #81
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

Yea I’m tempted to upgrade because I assume that people just don’t like change. But then seeing nn group doesn’t like it isn’t a great sign. Definitively going to wait and see what people say in a few months.

To be fair, the article on the NN site has a top banner with current section which occupies at least a third of a screen and makes it not very pleasant to read on the iphone.

I don’t understand why usability experts’ website has worse experience than 90% of the web?

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

#445

Post by sotix »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #53
mfro wrote: post #5

Literally every change made in iOS 26 feels like a downgrade to me. This is the first time I have ever considered downgrading iOS.

Agreed, it’s pretty bad. It causes my 16 pro max to lag in some apps, Siri is broken, etc. Very surprised this made it through QA to GA.

Any specific apps? I'm not having performance issues on an iPhone SE 3, which should be a lot less powerful, but perhaps I haven't bumped into them. Or maybe apps use different resources on a less powerful phone?

Siri was broken for me for the first few days but suddenly began working again! That was frustrating, but I'm happy it's back. I have no clue what fixed it because it wasn't a software update.

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

#446

Post by sotix »

hamburglar wrote: post #174
binarynate wrote: post #13

I haven't upgraded to iOS 26 because of Liquid Glass, mostly because I've read that it causes performance degradation on older devices (I use an iPhone 13 Mini because I have zero interest in using a larger phone). So, it looks like I'll be using iOS 18 for the foreseeable future.

For what it’s worth, I upgraded to 26 on a 3rd gen SE and perf is totally fine. I do hate most of the UI changes though. I really hope they do a dot release that lets me turn off the “safari viewport is big but we draw crap on top of it” stuff. I keep cursing at the title bar and url bar obscuring important things.

Performance is fine on my SE 3rd gen as well

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

#447

Post by sotix »

Somewhat surprisingly, I don't dislike the update as much as I thought I would. I do take large issue with text and buttons being on top of other elements that makes it hard to read them, and the article points out some very good examples. I also don't understand why the Music app got a fancy upgrade but the Classical app did not. The bottom player bars are completely different. It's as if they forgot about updating the Classical app.

However, I am a huge fan of buttons being visually buttons again. Flat design was a poor UI in my opinion. It's nice that I can distinguish what can be pressed again!

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

#448

Post by EasyMark »

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…

I always wait for each point release and see if complaints are up or down. I can adjust to about any UI, as long as 80-90% stays the same. For example I ditched windows almost completely at 8 when they left the classic look and went for tablet mode. That's when I went to Mac, I'd been an avid linux user since the 90s though. What I can't put up with are bugs, so I wait out reviews and such from actual technical people and tech sites like reddit and hackernews. It's a policy that hasn't failed me yet.

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

#449

Post by EasyMark »

lynndotpy wrote: post #342
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…

If it were implemented as intended, it would just be very ugly, slower, and a waste of battery life. But a lot of it is really just broken. In the past hour, I saw a number of funny glitches. The funny glitches are better than the glitches where things crash or hang. On MacOS, it even requires running terminal commands at startup to fix performance regressions. This is hitting people who aren't tech-savvy particularl…

You don't need to tell people to update to 26 though? it's easy enough to keep updating 15.x as long as mac keeps pumping out security updates.

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

#450

Post by EasyMark »

torben-friis wrote: post #37

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…

I keep reading about all the memory leaks and have been staying far away. Lots of people reporting slowdowns and crashes and not being able to launch new apps. That just shows really bad QA across not just one app or the OS but across the whole process. Probably the hurry to get out a new OS version every year instead of every couple
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