I’ll never understand this sentiment expressed online that Liquid Glass is bad design.
After reading how awful it is on HN, I upgraded to see it for myself. After some pondering it was obvious why Apple went with this design.
Today’s apps’ problem is every app has its own UI language, and users have to first learn that before being able to use an app. Apple recognized this. If you can’t see why it’s a problem, try to teach your mom or grandma how to use a new app.
To design a unified UI framework, you need a lot of things: common elements (e.g. date picker), typography (fonts, text styling), iconography (the same icon in every app for the Share button), etc. Both Apple annd Android vendors already have UI frameworks dictating these for native apps today.
The hard problem that remained unsolved until Liquid Glass is these UI toolkits can’t dictate a color for interactive elements, because every other app has its own, different color scheme. Any color you pick will inevitably look out of place in some apps. The answer here is, unsurprisingly, transparent elements.
But there is historically a huge issue with transparent elements, a hard problem where many previous attempts have failed: how can you make a transparent element (e.g a button) still be recognizable on various content?
Apple’s answer here works beautifully: make the controls appear floating an inch over the content, by mimicking the properties of the two most familiar physical transparent objects - water and glass.
“Today’s apps’ problem is every app has its own UI language, and users have to first learn that before being able to use an app.”
Liquid Glass is far from the first attempt at this. See “material design”. Apple has had UI guidelines for years now, and all of their apps were more or less as consistent as they are now after the transition. My complaint is that shiny effects aren’t necessary for UI consistency, and it slows older devices and consumes their already degraded battery capacity even faster. At least you can “reduce transparency”, but it actually makes the UI looks less transparent than it was before.
However, my biggest complaint is how half-baked it is. iOS 26 is riddled with bugs. As an example that is ridiculously easy to reproduce:
1) Enable “reduce transparency” in accessibility.
2) Open the Files app to any directory.
3) Enable dark mode. Congratulations, the directory name at the top of the screen is now illegible due to black text on a black background. The same bug is also present in Freeform, except it also makes the status bar illegible. They removed the backing UI element without refactoring the text, and nobody noticed. And unless they didn’t mention it in the release notes, it looks like they still haven’t fixed this in the 26.1 beta.
I never said Liquid Glass is bad design. I never even mentioned anything about individual elements, nor brought up anything about who it is bad for (and this is one of those occasions where no, it's not a "people aren't used to change" kind of things).
But to suggest the current implementation in iOS and macOS isn't problematic would mean you'd need to be incredibly unaware of basic accessibility needs of a significant portion of people, and right now both operating systems have made it significantly worse. That's not a design opinion, its fact.
It’s weird to complain about accessibility in macOS when it has such a huge amount of easily discoverable accessibility settings to handle just about every need… including the option to turn off liquid glass effect!
So you're saying its fine to go backwards on a11y as long as you dont remove some settings to switch to an afterthought that doesn't always have feature parity, and is often buggy with little care or thought being given to those who have a11y neds (As has already been explained above in another chain of this discussion)
After reading how awful it is on HN, I upgraded to see it for myself. After some pondering it was obvious why Apple went with this design.
Today’s apps’ problem is every app has its own UI language, and users have to first learn that before being able to use an app. Apple recognized this. If you can’t see why it’s a problem, try to teach your mom or grandma how to use a new app.
To design a unified UI framework, you need a lot of things: common elements (e.g. date picker), typography (fonts, text styling), iconography (the same icon in every app for the Share button), etc. Both Apple annd Android vendors already have UI frameworks dictating these for native apps today.
The hard problem that remained unsolved until Liquid Glass is these UI toolkits can’t dictate a color for interactive elements, because every other app has its own, different color scheme. Any color you pick will inevitably look out of place in some apps. The answer here is, unsurprisingly, transparent elements.
But there is historically a huge issue with transparent elements, a hard problem where many previous attempts have failed: how can you make a transparent element (e.g a button) still be recognizable on various content?
Apple’s answer here works beautifully: make the controls appear floating an inch over the content, by mimicking the properties of the two most familiar physical transparent objects - water and glass.