Long live frutiger aero

Enable iOS 18 Developer Beta and the nag screens go away.

Running iOS 17.6.1 on my iPhone 13 mini right now. I've got a backup iPhone 13 mini new in the box with the factory OS still installed (just in case).

I'm hoping my devices can hold out longer than Apple can remain irrational.

Remember that Apple is also pushing that update out to serve their iPhones that cannot get iOS 26. Even if I was to maximize my cynicism, I don't think they presently use security point releases in the manner you are describing.

Now I don't see any iOS 18 updates at all, only the iOS 26 prompts. What a dick move, Apple. Especially if this is a) a security update, and b) iOS 26 is known to run poorly on older phones like mine.

Thanks for the workaround!

I wouldn’t say so. The “Increase Contrast” and “Show Borders” accessibility options make liquid glass just bearable to me, but the new UI design is still ungracefully buggy and unnecessarily hard(er) to use. (See e.g. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/liquid-glass/ for a detailed discussion.)

Sure, life goes on. However, considering the price tag of an iPhone/iPad, I understand how iOS 26 is off-putting to so many people – despite all the other new features.

The thing is, Liquid Glass is already using a shader to render the refraction effect on top of the other UI layers. But - at least from my own developer experiments - it doesn't actually use anything graphical to determine what background color it needs to contrast against[1]. Instead, it looks through the view hierarchy for a view on the same edge as the toolbar the widget is in, and then grabs some undocumented[0] property from that view to determine its background. This fails if there's a split. Build, say, a toolbar layout and put two views inside of it, split 50% vertically with one having a black background and the other white. Put items in your toolbar on both left and right sides. They will either be all black or all white, only contrasting with half the screen.

[0] Or, at least, I have yet to find out what this property is.

[1] Hell, for icons and text they could XOR the alpha mask with the underlying pixels, or a blurred version thereof, to make text that will always contrast.

Plus there’s the pile of outright visual bugs and glitches. Like my keyboard opening with one size, then after a moment resizing itself a few pixels narrower because it initially rendered a little too big and off center to the right, like a badly-designed webpage. Every single time I open it. Including to write and edit this comment.

I also notice that I had to turn a bunch of accessibility features on so I wouldn’t constantly see animations with tons of dropped frames making me feel like I’m playing a bad port of a 3D PlayStation 2 game on a Gameboy Advance.