5 ms·

Liquid Glass seems like a big step backwards. It's new for newness' sake and hardly brings any UI improvements.

lagniappe 1y ago
I suspect it was UI work done to coincide with the assumed (at the time) forthcoming dominance of the Apple Vision, if you consider the timeline. Cant waste that work even if Vision flopped. If you cant get society to embrace Vision, integrate it into their 2d UI as a trojan horse to make it more familiar and try again with the next generation when AR comes back after the AI fervor dies down. This same strategy is what brought coffee and starbucks to Japan using a ten year plan, first they had to start with coffee flavored candy to get the kids used to it, then 10 years later only then you can begin bringing in more coffee flavors, soon you have a Starbucks here and there.
- abujazar 1y ago
  Maybe, but I don't think visionOS can fully explain the move towards more transparency. Older macOS versions (in the Mac OS X days) used a lot more transparency, and the first iterations of Aqua around 2001-2005 actually had a lot in common with Liquid Glass. Transparency everywhere was abandoned for obvious usability/accessibility reasons as well as changing standards for aesthetics. iOS 6 -> iOS 7 was a huge improvement, moving towards simplicity and minimalism. Liquid Glass feels more like bloat and a lot of wasted screen estate.
  - AlexandrB 1y ago
    > iOS 6 -> iOS 7 was a huge improvement It was not. Probably one of the biggest UI regressions of my lifetime on par with Windows 7 -> Windows 8. The iOS 7 design is so limiting in what it can communicate that it took Apple several major releases to make the iOS shift key's state legible to users. Arguably, they still haven't nailed it. I also find the idea that's iOS 7 is minimalistic comical, since information density dropped in most applications after the transition in favor of white space padding (necessary because the boundaries between UI and content were no longer obvious).
    - abujazar 1y ago
      I found iOS 7 to be a long overdue cleanup in the skeuomorphic design that had gone too far. I agree that revisions were necessary – but at least it was a step in the right direction. Liquid Glass seems like a step towards bloat and gloss with obvious usability downsides and no obvious advantages to the current design system.
      - AlexandrB 1y ago
        Just because skeuomorphism had gone too far, doesn't mean that ditching it completely was the right move. A step in the right direction would have been removing the rich, corinthian leather from the calendar app. What we got was a total obliteration of affordances that made the UI easy to understand and intuit. This problem persists to this day, probably because there is no clear way to indicate intractability in the post iOS 7 design language. For example, I was recently confused by where a setting in macOS had gone until I realized the (i) icons in some settings panels are clickable and bring up an additional setting modal (example from the Battery settings [1]). WTF!? There's no indication that this is a button at all - you either know this is a button or you don't. And there's my perpetual bugbear - information density. Apparently it's getting worse again[2] with liquid glass, but iOS 7 was the original sin here. Removing affordances necessitated using whitespace to separate controls from each other and from content in many places because you have nothing else - but this means a dense, compact UI is often no longer possible. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/108376 https://support.apple.com/en-us/108376 [2] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/07/04/ios-26-information-density/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/07/04/ios-26-information-densit...
  - Y-bar 1y ago
    > iOS 6 -> iOS 7 Never in my life has an operating system update decreased usability as much as this step. iOS 6 in some ways felt a bit dated at the time, sure, certainly flourishes were unnecessary… But iOS 7 was worse in every regard that mattered such as readability, discoverability, content density, visual consistency, and so on. I’m glad we are moving on finally. But I am afraid we are moving further in the wrong direction.
- oldpersonintx2 1y ago
  overthink. there is no master plan. if Tim Cook had a master plan, you would have been driving an Apple Car by now
elpakal 1y ago
I've been using the iOS26 beta and I HAAATE the transparent/blurry navigation bar. I'm curious what the impact is to a11y users though—it's been a while since I had to think about it but I remember having pretty strict requirements on background/foreground font and color differences for users with suboptimal vision.

I suspect it was UI work done to coincide with the assumed (at the time) forthcoming dominance of the Apple Vision, if you consider the timeline. Cant waste that work even if Vision flopped. If you cant get society to embrace Vision, integrate it into their 2d UI as a trojan horse to make it more familiar and try again with the next generation when AR comes back after the AI fervor dies down. This same strategy is what brought coffee and starbucks to Japan using a ten year plan, first they had to start with coffee flavored candy to get the kids used to it, then 10 years later only then you can begin bringing in more coffee flavors, soon you have a Starbucks here and there.

abujazar 1y ago
Maybe, but I don't think visionOS can fully explain the move towards more transparency. Older macOS versions (in the Mac OS X days) used a lot more transparency, and the first iterations of Aqua around 2001-2005 actually had a lot in common with Liquid Glass. Transparency everywhere was abandoned for obvious usability/accessibility reasons as well as changing standards for aesthetics. iOS 6 -> iOS 7 was a huge improvement, moving towards simplicity and minimalism. Liquid Glass feels more like bloat and a lot of wasted screen estate.
- AlexandrB 1y ago
  > iOS 6 -> iOS 7 was a huge improvement It was not. Probably one of the biggest UI regressions of my lifetime on par with Windows 7 -> Windows 8. The iOS 7 design is so limiting in what it can communicate that it took Apple several major releases to make the iOS shift key's state legible to users. Arguably, they still haven't nailed it. I also find the idea that's iOS 7 is minimalistic comical, since information density dropped in most applications after the transition in favor of white space padding (necessary because the boundaries between UI and content were no longer obvious).
  - abujazar 1y ago
    I found iOS 7 to be a long overdue cleanup in the skeuomorphic design that had gone too far. I agree that revisions were necessary – but at least it was a step in the right direction. Liquid Glass seems like a step towards bloat and gloss with obvious usability downsides and no obvious advantages to the current design system.
    - AlexandrB 1y ago
      Just because skeuomorphism had gone too far, doesn't mean that ditching it completely was the right move. A step in the right direction would have been removing the rich, corinthian leather from the calendar app. What we got was a total obliteration of affordances that made the UI easy to understand and intuit. This problem persists to this day, probably because there is no clear way to indicate intractability in the post iOS 7 design language. For example, I was recently confused by where a setting in macOS had gone until I realized the (i) icons in some settings panels are clickable and bring up an additional setting modal (example from the Battery settings [1]). WTF!? There's no indication that this is a button at all - you either know this is a button or you don't. And there's my perpetual bugbear - information density. Apparently it's getting worse again[2] with liquid glass, but iOS 7 was the original sin here. Removing affordances necessitated using whitespace to separate controls from each other and from content in many places because you have nothing else - but this means a dense, compact UI is often no longer possible. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/108376 https://support.apple.com/en-us/108376 [2] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/07/04/ios-26-information-density/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/07/04/ios-26-information-densit...
- Y-bar 1y ago
  > iOS 6 -> iOS 7 Never in my life has an operating system update decreased usability as much as this step. iOS 6 in some ways felt a bit dated at the time, sure, certainly flourishes were unnecessary… But iOS 7 was worse in every regard that mattered such as readability, discoverability, content density, visual consistency, and so on. I’m glad we are moving on finally. But I am afraid we are moving further in the wrong direction.
oldpersonintx2 1y ago
overthink. there is no master plan. if Tim Cook had a master plan, you would have been driving an Apple Car by now

elpakal 1y ago

I've been using the iOS26 beta and I HAAATE the transparent/blurry navigation bar. I'm curious what the impact is to a11y users though—it's been a while since I had to think about it but I remember having pretty strict requirements on background/foreground font and color differences for users with suboptimal vision.