25
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iOS26 "Liquid Glass" - is it really such a big deal?
Is this just the usual pointless Apple fanfare?
I'm not very techy so I'm just wondering why this is a big deal. It seems to me it's just a different theme of sorts? But in this video MKBHD is making it out to be a really big deal. Is it like technologically super impressive? What's the big deal?
I don't get the big deal either. Also it just reminds me of Aero Glass from Windows 7, lol.
I've always found MKBHD a bit light on actual technical detail and heavier on hype.
I don't have any Apple devices, so I don't really care other than that other companies will try to copy it without thinking, but to me it just looks tacky. Technically impressive, but still tacky. So indeed, just like Aero Glass.
MKBHD is less about the technical side and more about the design side or feeling side.
But I suppose his point is that this type of UI design (at least to this level) has not been done much in the past, especially on mobile devices. Now with more powerful processing, this level of design is doable without having to worry about performance.
It just gives designers more toys or options and continues the battle between "looks good" and "looks readable/useable".
*Vista...Win 7 did use it too, but it's even older than that!
Like any new UI design, many will be repulsed by Liquid Glass on sight simply because it's new and different. Many of those same people will grow used to it after some amount of time. Its most daring elements will be scaled back over its next few iterations until it finds some neutrality. Ultimately it's not going to change the way people actually use their devices. But MKBHD's video didn't spend much time on the most impressive parts of Liquid Glass: the physics and lighting system driving its animations. You can best see it in this part, when he slowly drags the Notification Center view down. Watch the bottom edge of the view as it slides down. The edge itself takes on different specular highlights, adjusts chromatic aberration, and refracts light according to the content behind it, all in real time at 120 fps. Watch here, too, at the top of the "Customize" button, and see how the top edge takes on a different specular highlight according to the content it's "reflecting". All this is very impressive on a technical level, and I would say that all these little touches, that might not be noticed individually, will add up to an experience that users ultimately find delightful. But will it be useful, and readable? The jury's still out.
One repeated complaint has been related to poor contrast differences between overlapping elements. Images and short videos I've seen demonstrate this well enough to indicate it is (or was) a problem even for the average iPhone user. A specific example is when you pull down the command center while on your home screen.
It's probably even worse for people with visual impairments. But Apple is pretty good with their accessibility options, so that may not be as significant for this group after they turn on some of those settings.
I don't think too many people are hating on "different" as much as they are expressing frustration about how it feels like taking a few steps backwards. Even windows aero wasn't this bad - the start menu had enough contrast to keep things readable.
Agreed, I was disgusted by this design from the beginning, and I thought for a very valid reason of accessibility. Aesthetics aside, multiple screenshots, including official ones from Apple's keynote and marketing materials had some glaring problems with readability, here's one example. I have quite good eyesight and it's straining/annoying for even me to read. Thankfully this particular example can be overcome with different wallpaper, though that shouldn't be necessary by design. (I can only use dark wallpapers now, otherwise my notifications are UNREADABLE? Wtf). Tyranny of the default. I feel like the "default" design language of more things should be heading towards accessibility instead of away from it. IMO "good" design embraces this kind of thing, not aesthetics-only fluff that gets thrown around and called "design" when it isn't. Sometimes good design may deprioritize aesthetics for more important reasons.
There was another example of a music player where the background was blurry and carried through the colors/brightness of the albums/art/etc behind it, and in some cases made the foreground UI very hard to read (and tangentially, exceedingly ugly on top of that)
But Apple (even as a user of a Mac and iPhone myself) has often been a form-over-function kind of company when it comes to design, so I'm not entirely surprised. Then again, they've often had what seemed to me like pretty good accessibility focus and controls.
It just feels like readability was an afterthought this time and that they're just chasing something needlessly overdone and "shiny" and trying to go for some temporary novelty "wow" factor that only works for marketing and not every day use. Also feels wasteful. Do I really need my phone to have these refractive/graphics effects for its INTERFACE? Why are you wasting precious battery life rendering this shit
Whoever designed it is not really a designer, but merely an aestheticist
There’s definitely good reasons why every company (including Apple) have walked back their more transparent designs over the years. And if many people enable the Reduce Transparency accessibility setting, why bother with Liquid Glass in the first place?
I think what will happen with Liquid Glass is the same thing that happens with all these transparent designs. I just hope it doesn’t take years for Apple to reach that conclusion.
People just hate new things. Then they learn to accept them. Then they get older and become nostalgic about the things that anchored their younger days and love them.
People hated the Eiffel Tower at first, now they love it. People hated the Sears Tower at first, now they love it. People hated the Transamerica Pyramid at first, now they love it. People hate the Salesforce Tower right now, but I'll bet $100,000 that they'll love it someday. It's the same cycle.
While this is true, it is also used to justify a lot of "change for the sake of change" which often acts as a pointless treadmill or is A/B testing to manipulate behavior for more advertising.
I don't need my chat app to rework its UI every 6 months. It just becomes an exercise in murdering muscle memory.
PS: The Comcast tower still sucks.
I like Salesforce tower. The park is nice too.
I watched the video and am confused what you’re talking about. MKBHD didn’t make it out like a big deal? He spend most of it talking about how it’s polarizing and how Apple walked some of their liquid glass designs back in the most recent beta. And then just described the UI.
At the beginning of the video he says he's going through the top five features of iOS 26 with the Liquid Glass redesign coming in at number 1. That definitely seems like he's saying it's a big deal. On one hand, it kind of is a big deal because it's a major front end redesign that most iPhone users are going to notice. On the other hand... it's not super impressive at a high level. I think the redesign really shines in the subtleties (like glass refraction at the edges of some areas), but I don't think most users will be very aware of those. At the end of the day, it's a different theme. Large visibility, but not ultimately super impressive from my own experiences.
I mean, if we’re talking on a relative scale to: “things coming out in ios26”, then yeah it is a big deal, and I feel it should be evident why.
Can you even name something that came out in ios25? iOS 24?
A complete redesign of the UI is something rarely seen in annual iOS updates, which tends to be incremental features.
The other 4 features in the video are: a minor redesign of the camera app, being able to use Apple intelligence to identify objects in your album, some updates to transcription features in the phone app, phone call modals being smaller in carplay.
Do you not think liquid glass, a complete redesign of the entire phone UI that some people love and some people hate, is a bigger deal than those 4?
So FYI, iOS 26 jumped from iOS 18. So you got me there, I cannot name anything that came out in iOS 25 or 24!
Anyways, as an example, iOS 18 introduced text formatting in iMessage if I am not mistaken which was actually huge for me.
And yes, I do think Liquid Glass is a bigger deal than the other 4. I think I was clear about it being a big deal in my first reply. I just don't think it's a big deal from a technical perspective. There are certainly impressive things about it like I mentioned.
Honestly, no, I don't think it's a bigger deal than the rest, as described in the video. That AI feature is way more interesting as someone who frequently needs to find old photos based on vague memories of what was in them. And a more useful camera app rates higher for me.
But I'm an Android user, and use all kinds of other non-Apple applications. Including Windows. Major UI redesigns are pretty commonplace for me. Between Windows and Android, I can and have done my own UI overhauls.
Outside the relative scale a UI redesign is pretty minor. We're on the outside looking in, not only exposed to what's inside the Apple ecosystem. It just doesn't seem like a big deal from this perspective. The question is why it's a big deal for those within the ecosystem because it's hard to see for those outside of it. Like, my best guess is that it's an impressive shader that is very performant on Apple hardware, and it looks pretty neato. I guess it's just the simple fact that it's so rare that it happening at all makes it the biggest possible deal?
It's a big deal because it affects every moment you interact with your iPhone. One difference with the android ecosystem, is that on both macOS and iOS there is a culture of trying to have applications which adhere to broad themes, spearheaded by the OS. There is a strong preference for native UI. Whereas on Android (and windows), it's pretty much the wild west, UI-wise.
What that means is that if you find liquid glass's design theming, say, hard to read, as many have complained, you're going to find EVERYTHING hard to read. Every default apple app. Most if not all third party apps. They're all going to look like liquid glass, sooner or later. You're going to find everything hard to read.
And vice versa, of course. If you love how liquid glass looks, then that will proliferate to every aspect of the phone's usage.
WWDC is also, foremost, a developer conference. It's definitely a big deal do have this dropped on you: "Hey, you're all going to have to redesign your apps and scrap other roadmap work you might have, because Tim Cook decided iOS and MacOS don't look enough like his pet Vision Pro project."
The biggest thing to happen to iOS in years is the Apple Intelligence flop.
It’s a pretty much finished product at this point. There aren’t any actual big features on the horizon.
That depends on how much you believe in “AI” as being particularly revolutionary for mobile devices. Apple Intelligence was a hedge Apple at least needed to try, so they have some foothold if “AI” becomes a lasting trend, but if it doesn’t it’ll just be one of another business hedges that didn’t prove necessary in the end.
To be clear I'm saying that the act of flopping was the big thing. Not that the meager functionality was the big thing.
Worth noting he said he's ranking the list "in order of how big of a deal it is". So liquid glass being #1 cements it as being apparently the biggest of deals here.
Thanks! This was basically what I was thinking too. For now I'm disabling updates because I don't think my 3-4 year old iPhone 13 won't suffer irt. performance and battery
i was on the first db on a 12 mini and it ran just fine — ugly, though, so i went back to 18.
i’m going to be holding out for a toggle or whatever to disable it… which may never come. i hate the borders around everything the most.
This is supposed to be the biggest feature of the update.
It’s apple overhyping this as “revolutionary”. You’d think we’d have gotten used to that since jobs announced the iPod and then the iPhone… forever ago. But nope, every time it’s “revolutionary”.
Personally, I have been an Apple user consistently since 1998.
I DO NOT view Apple Glass as that important. It is just better looking version of the same OS.
I do think Apple is slowly coming around to merging iPad OS and Mac OS, and this is another step towards achieving that.
I think Apple is going to have a rough year, as Apple AI is delayed and behind.
Apple needs some new innovation or needs to come up with a way to simplify their products. Starting to share OS would be one way of achieving this.
Just prefacing this by saying I am not a designer, I do not deal with design and UI at all, I'm just a casual observer.
In many ways, this is pretty standard tech company hype. A big change in UI design is usually not something users ask for, especially now since phones have gotten super mature. But, because this is something new, people should care about it and be hyped for it.
That being said though, this era of flat design has existed now for over a decade so change was definitely coming at some point. Samsung and Google both unveiled new looks for their UIs earlier this year and Apple were rumored to update their UI design since the iPhone 15-series launch in 2023 and people saw the Action Button menu in settings. When Apple switched to flat design in 2014 with iOS 7, that really pushed a lot of things to also go for flat design so Apple switching to this new skeuomorphic/flat combo is a big deal (imo) and companies will be rushing to also shift their UI designs to be more in line with what Apple are doing now.
I'm surprised that the reactions are all so negative. I thought this would range from "neat" to "whatever".
I am personally glad to see something different in UI. Flat UIs are so depressing that I find it difficult to work on things. Others mentioned Windows Vista/7 Aero, which was genuinely the last time that I liked the way a UI looked. I hope that this is a step towards getting rid of the overbearing minimalism in modern UI design, even if just a small one.