It's a senior editor's opinion on the UI of iOS 26.
But you can turn that stuff off. They may try to trick you so you have to remain somewhat vigilant. But I don’t think they ever absolutely force you to upgrade.
At a certain part they stop signing the OS. At that point because it doesn’t have the cryptographic signature you can’t install it at all and your only choice is something newer.
With point releases or security updates that tends to be pretty fast because they don’t want people downgrading to something vulnerable. When going from iOS X to iOS X + 1 grace period is usually longer before they stop that.
And, of course, if you try and install an iOS 26 backup on the phone that you just moved back to 18… you’re just gonna be on 26 again. So you better make sure you have the right back up.
I downgraded about 10 minutes after trying iOS 26. Sorry to all who missed the window.
They are certainly overwhelmed by the problems caused by the terrible visual design, which does not accomplish its stated goals and usually is a very large setback compared to what we had previously.
That made a world of difference for me.
This could be significant improvement if Apple let us choose the transparency percentage.
Why do I need to watch a mini video to have UI controls appear? It's incredibly annoying.
My Linux install feels so much faster than Windows or OSX and the main reason is that it's not filled with a bunch of useless, slow animation.
On macOS you can speed up/disable the animations using some hidden defaults (you can easily find that on the internet).
Personally I like the animations; I find them well-done on macOS. They serve a purpose but are not “too much” either IMHO.
I’ve subjectively had battery life regressions for most iOS updates until the first minor version update or so, but that might also just have correlated with extensive re-indexing of Photos and things like that.
I've always found Google's decision to include mid-tier SoCs into their flagship phones risky as it makes performance hitches for future updates much more obvious. If/when Google copies Liquid Glass into the next version of Material Design, I'm sure my phone will suffer from a performance hit too.
That said, scrolling HN still works fine on hardware from a decade ago, so there's got to be more to this. I've personally had custom ROMs experience random lags and slowdowns after major upgrades (which is probably why many ROMs claim it doesn't work and don't support it) and I wouldn't be surprised if the Android upgrade hit a similar issue on your phone. As a last resort before buying a new phone, doing a factory reset may make the new OS more usable on your device. Not the right solution (fixes from Google's side to prevent such issues would be right solution), but it might work and it's cheaper than a new phone.
I haven't upgraded it to iOS 26 / Liquid Glass, though, and given what I'm seeing/hearing, I don't plan to.
I also agree that they didn’t test it on smaller screens, there are lots of cases where things don’t quite fit right.
I’ve been wanting a better camera for a little while, I guess it’s time to adjust to something bigger :\
The safari changes are the worst part.
Yesterday, for the first time since I bought the phone, it died on me before 18:00 with regular usage. I used to charge everyday when I go to bed with around 15-25% left, now I can't even finish the work day.
I actually feel a warm computer now, something that I have never experienced in five years of having this M1 MacBook.
This takes amazing hardware and degrades it to Windows laptop slop.
In the Jobs days, at least one VP head would roll for this, and Apple would be far better off for it. I don't think Tim Cook is strong enough for that though.
IMO, this is 99% typical "not what I'm used to" internet rage. Upgrade and enjoy.
And there are some stupidly obvious bugs - like the WEATHER header in the weather app is black on a dark background.
And the way the buttons at the bottom of the page are tight up against the content instead of being centred in the space under it.
It reeks of design-for-resume-padding instead of design-for-user-delight.
There are now portions of iOS that use either iOS 18's UIKit, or iOS 26's Liquid Glass UI in apps.
It feels like Apple is having a Windows moment with their operating systems for the jarring combination of old and new UI designs sitting next to each other and it's gross. I hate it.
It feels like they pulled this out of their ass last minute after the AI siri failures, they had to have something to put out for 2025.
I actually don't mind it on iPhone outside of the bugs and inconsitencies, but it's attrocious on macOS and the new iPad windowing was obviously made with zero consideration for touch-first users and was only made to cater to the whiners about iPad needing to become more mac-like.
Just poorly though out all around.
.. or by definition, Apple is having an Apple moment :)
Its made my 12 pro max noticeably laggier though, which I'm definitely not a fan of..
OP seems to even deliberately choose a stupid message background just to prove his/her point. Of course, there's a lot of backgrounds to choose from.
Apparently the author (and most commenters here!) do not realize "cracked" is VERY popular gen z slang for being very good at something.
Turning on "Reduce Transparency" and "Increase Contrast" under Accessibility > Display makes the phone a pleasure to use.
I'd really, really love to read internal presentations leading up to this downgrade of a once proud UI (let's hear it for System 7) to what is now effectively a collection childish digital baubles.
If you want high contrast in your messages app...don't use a high contrast background image?
I think it all stems from trying to unify the UX/UI across devices, and to also pull the Vision VR device into that iphone-iPad-MacBook-watch grouping. Handoff and other cross-device interactions suffer when you have significantly different UI elements or interactions.
But this...this feels like a symptom of something fundamental inside Apple going wrong.
So, I didn't expect to mind this at all, despite lots of people apparently hating it.
Then I upgraded. And yeah, it's remarkably shitty looking, first time I've agreed with the "haters" for a macOS release. It looks like an above-average GTK theme, which is to say, awful. Plus they found a new and different way to make Safari's tabs look like crap (and I'd swear tab manipulation is super laggy now, where it wasn't before) and this time I can't fix it with a settings toggle. Like, that element specifically looks and feels like it's from a below average GTK theme.
I disliked the update for a week or so at first, but I have to say I find the liquid animations fun now.
Luckily I’ve also discovered that you can revert back to “bottom” tab mode in the settings, which brings back something similar to the old UI.
It's not like iOS where, once updated, you're generally blocked from ever downgrading back to a previous OS version.
I'm going to ride iOS 18 and macOS 15 into the sunset and then leave the Apple ecosystem.
What are some of the elements that have major impact?
I don't think this is atypical, we have color screens for a reason.
I think I had tracked 15+ things I would easily qualify as bugs the first two days after upgrading my phone - this would be absolutely unacceptable where I work, and we aren’t a trillion-dollar company with psychotic hiring standards.
Was this even QAed? I don’t like the look, but that’s a personal thing, these are actual issues that are not subjective.
Luckily, Apple is ok at supporting older phones, so I just have to be careful to not accidentally upgrade my SE to iOS 26.
Makes me nostalgic for Apple's interface guidelines, which were very well thought through, based on evidence, and with clear principles. https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/Human_Interface_Guidel...
However, this doesn't work if you've scrolled down already and the bar is minimized. It literally flashes as if to acknowledge your swipe and does nothing.
Also if you miss by moving your thumb just slightly lower, you'll close the app haha.
They thought about it a bit, but definitely not enough.
But, as you suggest, you have to tap the url to "bring it up" so it can be safely dragged upward, which is annoying. If they polish this a bit, I think it will be very nice.
If you have to have an invisible language, put it in a man page somewhere or something. I really don't like having my train of thought interrupted by "HEY, learn something new RIGHT NOW"
Even long time friends who are iOS fanatics, and who have used iOS since the beginning are often surprised when I show them a new gesture I’ve learnt. Am I missing something? I’m really grateful to learn this now but I can’t imagine the “Apple way” is to stumble upon these by forum comments?
The lock screen clock went from "can read in a split second" to "wait what number is this?".
Luckily there was a setting for that one.
If only the iPhone "menu bar" designers took that to heart. It is insane that I have to put on glasses to read the time when there is plenty of room to increase the damn font, but no option to do so.
I am gonna be LMAO when all these youngster UI designers age up to the point where they have to wear readers to use their crap UI.
You won’t be receiving any updates for iOS 18 after December or so, if your device supports iOS 26. Only the iPhone XR and XS will be receiving further iOS 18 updates, because they don’t support iOS 26. That has been Apple’s policy for many years now. Only devices that dropped out of major iOS updates receive minor updates to older iOS versions. The same minor updates are not made available to iPhone models that support a newer major version.
Also, I appreciate the UX improvements (as opposed to the pretty glass effect), such as the much improved menu system and the generally (IMO) improved changes in layout in Calendar, Mail, Safari, etc.
That said I do find it a bit more annoying to access different tabs in Safari but maybe that's why I get for using Safari.
Even with transparency on its gotten much better than the early betas, which is good, since that is the happy code path and gets more testing coverage.
Yet.
This design is really punitive for older, tireder eyes and they really need to learn not to do this. Because their audience gets older all the time (as the population in all western countries does).
Their design team is evidently skewed young again, and needs to really learn about how ageing affects eyesight for absolutely everyone. It is insane to put everyone over about 50 into an accessibility category, but eyesight ageing is one of the things that can't be held back.
When I tried to get Aero Glass into Linux themes, I found plenty of existing transparency-oriented themes, but all of them made Microsoft's decision to use frosted glass more obvious. There's a balance between the shininess and opacity that needs to be dialed down for the look to both look good and be clear.
I think Apple went too far with making their theme look shiny. I assume (hope) a 26.1 update coming out in a few months to tweak the UI and fix a lot of the usability issues.
As for the weird design choices around Safari: I've always found Safari's UI to be one of the most confusing parts of iOS. It was never quite obvious to me what menu I would need to hit to get to what feature. I think removing the tab button is a step backwards for sure, but with my normal struggle to use it, I've barely noticed it to be honest. I find the button as easy to find as I do most Safari buttons, and that includes previous versions.
macOS seems particularly bad for built-in software, though. It seems like Apple changed the look of standard list boxes/navigation panels/whatever they call the menu on the left, and a lot of built-in macOS applications look terrible when multiple of these panes are placed near each other.
The human eye was not designed to look at text or to look at text on top of solid color static backgrounds which don’t exist in nature.
Our eye was designed to look at noise and filter moving noise. It is better to have a background that distinguishes itself based off of texture and movement rather than a sudden contrast of divergent flat colors.
Yes flat design is logically more efficient I understand this but human evolution has evolved our bodies to be narrow and efficient within a niche. If we move outside of that niche things become inefficient even detrimental.
Take for instance: eating. You’re not designed to eat the most calorie dense fatty foods even though high energy reserves seems like a good thing. Your body ended up evolving towards a niche: a narrow band of caloric intake.
It’s the same thing with visual design. You go too extreme and too efficient with flat colors and flat design you are creating patterns your eye was not optimized for. Your eye was optimized for noise inefficiency and to find patterns and glass emulates this quite well.
To be honest I just made up all the shit I said above. I somewhat believe it could be true but the ultimate reality is that it doesn’t matter that much. Your eye can handle flat design or Liquid Glass without any extra stress. It’s not really a big difference. Your eye can handle it and if you can’t you probably shouldn’t be driving and you should see an eye doctor. People are complaining about this because it’s different from what they are used to not because there’s an actual problem.
You could have used the time to type up that comment on the basics of visual design, and saved us all some sanity.
For hundreds of years, humans have been studying light, color, and shadows. All the way from the cave painters to great maters (da vinci) to modern UI/UX pioneers. There are absolutely things that do not work well (example: visual vibration -https://accessibility.psu.edu/color/brightcolors/) and there are combinations that work well.
So no, it isnt your eye. And you dont need to see an eye doctor. The person/team/company that designed it fell short of the mark.
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 that feels proportionate to the screwup I’m seeing. People was far more vocal about the lack of the new Siri.
But yes agreed, it is mind-boggling to me how broadly well-received this has been
I would claim this is mostly unrelated to 26, and more related to .0. All the tech people that I know, who have experience with Apple OS releases, wait until .1 release to upgrade, for this reason. .0 are always a shit-show, since my first Apple device over 10 years ago. I see .0 as a public beta, and that's what I expect whenever I do decide to install them. I suspect there's some truth to this, where they don't have time to fix everything found in the actual beta.
One tap by holding the 3 dots and dragging finger to the “new tab” item.
But I didn’t like “compact” so switched to “bottom” layout for Tabs from Settings > Apps > Safari.
You do have to discover that faster way to do it, and the alternative is three taps.
I can’t speak for people with visual impairments, but for me, many of the effects actually work, and I appreciate the on average larger hit targets.
Some things, like the little icons inline of some macOS menu bar items, actually make it easier to quickly spot a given option in a long list to me.
This is how it worked on OG iTunes. (Did it also scroll on the iPod?)
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
Some subset of users like re-learning how to do the same basic things in a new way, such as switching browser tabs, but most people want to spend ~0 time on that stuff and get justified annoyed when it's pushed on them.
Of course over time people will get used to the new design, but even if the new one is materially worse what are people going to do? It's not like Apple cares that much about random user opinion and the joy of a monopoly or duopoly is that the companies controlling one don't have all that much incentive to keep people happy.
It's just that people get used to bad software.
Or that it improves silently between several versions. Or that it just keeps getting worse, and people are justified every time.
I don't know a lot about Apple. Android seems to be partially at each of those camps.
I also notice that CarPlay has more contrast now, and not much Liquid Glass. Kinda telling.
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 Android, but now Apple has essentially decided that this Liquid Glass will be mandatory after a year of support for "compatibility mode" that disables it for your app.
We'll now have to spend expensive engineering time to cater to Apple's design whims rather than actually working on PMF and profitability.
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.
It's time to retire this dead meme. The most successful SAASes in the world are just websites that people pay for hand-over-fist regardless of what OS they use. Netflix doesn't use Liquid Glass, Spotify doesn't bother. Google Docs isn't going to inherit it and probably neither will Office 365. Websites online by-and-large won't adopt this design either.
The ideal of everyone taking the time to make a sexy native UI is appealing. But it's never going to fully be realized, especially when OEMs resist basic A11Y obligations and insist on battery-draining eye candy.
Integrate into each OS as much as you can.
I see like 3-5 UI bugs a day in iOS 26. Liquid ass, indeed. Some apple product VP really wanted to be the next Steve Jobs, took 4 steps backwards instead.
I'll probably end up switching to android eventually, and I am bummed about it bc I am an apple fan boy and I like the ecosystem.
Holy shit, why?!
Clicking the too of the screen always would bring you back to the top and then search was right there! This is what we get when people cater to the lowest denominator and try holding the hands of people I don't want to be lumped in with.
This seems to be a spinoff of the tendency to put controls on top of vertical video. Amusingly, just as design is focusing on vertical layout, folding phones are coming in.
Also I now have this instinctive feeling that every time I upgrade iOS on my devices, the battery is going to get hammered a bit more.
I would love it if they did for iOS what they did for Mac OS Snow Leopard - no new features, just performance improvements on the existing software.
Of course it might cannibalise iOS device sales, but maybe (just maybe), it would result in improved customer loyalty and commitment to Apple - not just for their hardware but also their software. A case of long-term gains over short-term targets.
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 Cross-Fade Transitions
It seems like it
a) Annoys users when their devices change out from under them.
b) Reduces the incentive to buy the new thing with the new fashionable update.
Anyone have any idea why the business case works out the way it does?
For example, I'm in safari and push the bookmark button and it and the neighboring buttons light up. But my finger is blocking the button I'm pressing so I don't know it's the brightest button. Instead I see the neighboring buttons light up and my brain thinks I'm pressing that.
It's been a few weeks now and you'd think I'd be over it by now but I'm not. I press the screen, a button I don't want lights up, oh no wrong button, oh wait never mind.
And a follow up question: did anyone test whether reducing liquid glass effects improves battery life?
Thankfully most of the "liquid glassy" things can be undone in the accessibility options on iOS.
--
As an app developer I (generally) like liquid glass, it injects some much needed fun and freshness into our devices. It's still rough around the edges and some of these points are very valid, especially around not overdoing it to show off and some text-on-text issues.
However I do think some of the issues raised are based on a different goals around legibility.
I think NNgroup wants all interfaces to be optimally legible at any given moment. I think Apple wants all interfaces to have access to legibility at any given moment, typically by moving the screen a bit.
These are legitimate differences of opinion. A physical metaphor might be that you have a paper with a glass paperweight atop it. If one were to judge a photo of your perspective looking at it as though it were a UI, they might comment that the paper is hard to read in places because of the paperweight.
But in reality, it takes half a second to move that paperweight aside to read the paper, and the paperweight serves another valuable purpose keeping the paper from moving. This is akin to other purposes UI elements serve. It's a balance and a tradeoff.
Just like Steve Jobs pointed out to Round Rects Are Everywhere! [0], the physical world is full of content that obscures other content. What do we do? We turn our head a bit, or move a thing aside. We don't expect the physical world to have optimal legibility at all possible perspectives. While we can (and should) do better in the digital realm, there is a spectrum and the optimal point may not be where NNgroup wants it, especially as the capability of mobile devices reaches and exceeds that of the physical realm.
To address another point this article makes about touch targets:
Prior iOS versions made decisions about spacing between icons that were based on smaller devices (4.7-5.5", or 9.5-13 sq in). iPhones are larger these days (6.1-6.9", or 14-18 sq in), so the physical area of a touch target isn't actually that different, if at all. A big UI refresh is the time to update these kinds of assumptions.
[0] https://www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html
Meanwhile linux people are removing buttons, window borders entirely, sometimes removing colors too, it's glorious.
It made me wonder if the whining is less about the particulars of liquid glass (I mean, remember the aquagel days of early mac os x), and more of lamenting the unification of design. I personally, just do not believe that there is a design aesthetic where form<->function have a balanced interplay, and users of 8K desktop screens and handheld iPhones are going to want the exact same experience. Similiarities maybe. But not the same thing.
So many people treat things that just work and are stable as “stale” and “unexciting” and demand change for change’s sake, rather than actual measurable improvement.
Back then, I was sure Apple's designers (who I would see as very competent) would course-correct. What has been shown clearly was a "mood trailer" to me. Actually implementing this design would surely make them understand that they would need to dial back some of those effects for readability.
For a while, they seemed to have done that, utilizing frosted glass more than in the initial trailers. Recent betas however seemed like they are slowly converting back to full-glass with all the known usability issues.
I really don't know who at Apple thought "dark text on almost fully transparent button with dark background" was a good idea.
[1] https://laura.media/blog/liquid-glass-is-unreadable-now-what...
I tried to minimize the horrible glass design as much as possible because they couldn't see the text bleeding through the background. In my opinion, Liquid Glass is the worst design I have ever seen. It looks like a crappy GeoCities design from 1999. The team who designed it should be fired and replaced with people who priorities a professional appearance and usability.
iOS 26 is terrible on it. They decided to use gray as their selection color where it used to be a blue outline. So now I need to, while driving, visually hunt for a gray color to see what im about to select.
Even worse the gray color can either be the background of a target OR a border around the target, it's not consistent.
I strongly dislike Liquid Glass and would avoid upgrading for as long as possible. I would also delay updating both my personal and my work apps for the new design language. It is a massive usability downgrade, and it undoes all the effort I put into implementing accessibility related features in my apps. The negative sentiment has also been universally shared among my colleagues and other iOS devs I've talked about.
It is a major factor why I decided to skip an iPhone update for another year. I'd rather continue using my older device despite its dwindling battery life than be forced to use glass-based iOS version. Together with Apple's adversarial attitude to the regulation compliance in EU, its become increasingly more difficult to find any excitement in my dev job, and I find myself spending more and more time with my Linux desktop over my MBP.
On the phone, sure, whatever -- but on a work machine?! It's infuriating.
iOS 7's primary failure was that in ditching skeuomorphism (which wasn't entirely the wrong idea), it went too far and lost visual metaphor, not to mention most of the delightfulness and genuine beauty) Visual metaphor is the link between form and function.
iOS 26 and macOS 26 fails because they prioritize the "liquid glass" idea such that function is forced to follow form, not the other way around. Hence there's a lot of hard-to-read text, hard-to-discern visual boundaries, and big ugly one-off compromises (like the Music.app controls in the Songs grid view placed on top of the grid itself, with some transparency).
1) I am a dumbass, not a trillion dollar or whatever design company
2) I never managed to come up with something as stupid looking as that mailbox screenshot
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).
I think you'll quickly realize that static text content has a much more appreciable "reader mode" quality that isn't a slog to look at. There's oodles of colorslop in Liquid Glass that serves no purpose but to distract the user.
I find it unacceptable that people pay that kind of money for iPhones and iPads etc and have to deal with bugs, bubbles, readability issues with a theme that looks like a terrible 2011 android skin. And that’s a trillion dollar company.
Staying on 18, till iPhone dies.
I’ll be sticking with the previous iOS / MacOS versions as long as possible.
Chose worst-case images to make Messages look as bad as possible.
Same with the stacked, floating UI items.
And the "search bar" change causing us to re-learn habits? NOT TRUE. The old way works too; but now there's a discoverable alternative.
colechristensen•2h ago