iOS 26 Liquid Glass Initial Impressions
Published on 2025-06-20
I made the mistake decision to install iOS 26. Here are my
initial impressions.
What doesn’t matter
iOS 26 is currently a developer beta. There are obviously huge performance and stability problems. Apps crash, energy usage is high, some of the effects and UI items are janky, sometimes the whole system does a soft reboot. That’s not specific to this release. Nearly every significant software upgrade that Apple releases is rough in the early stages.
The good
Some of the changes do genuinely lead to a better UI in my opinion. Over time, it feels like each UI paradigm begins to degrade. Slowly, an operating system that felt unified begins to diverge on different UI paths. Apple’s own apps add new features and designs that just don’t quite fit into the original UI paradigm. Having a nice reset every once in a while works well to get everything back on the same page.
As far as “Liquid Glass” itself goes, with some reservations as detailed below, it’s a nice effect.
The bad
I like snappy interfaces. One of my favorite things about my macOS setup is how quickly I can snap between windows and spaces using the Yabai window manager. I love when things feel instantaneous. While animations are also nice, I don’t like them when they get in the way of usability. For example, I don’t care if someone made the most beautiful typing animation of all time, once the novelty wears off, I’m still going to be incredibly annoyed that it’s slowing my ability to type.
Unfortunately, iOS 26 goes a little too far into the realm of slowing everything down with cute animations. An example is the home screen, where apps fly into their place from the edge of the screen when you dismiss the lock screen. The new UI design of having menus pop out from the buttons that display them is also a cute little animation, but it also gets in the way of speed and core functionality as they slowly expand and then collapse.
Overall, too many slow animations.
The ugly
One of the biggest gripes I have with the Liquid Glass effect that Apple hasn’t quite ironed out yet is the contract. For any UI, one of the most important things is to make sure that users can pick out important information as quickly as possible. One of the best ways to do this is make sure people can quickly make out text against its background. The problem can be especially bad in Apple Music, when different colored album covers can make picking out the text more difficult.
Fortunately I have young and healthy eyes, but for more elderly people I would guess the problem of making white text out against a white background is only exacerbated.
The final item to file under the ugly is the uneasy relationship between the Liquid Glass UI elements that give a sense of depth against the background, and the flatter elements. The relationship between these two styles feels further strained when the same element can switch between them.
A perfect example of this is the Clock app. You can see in the first image that when you’re switching between the bottom navigation items, the item highlighting has the Liquid Glass effect. But the moment you let go it reverts back to a flat selected navigation item in the old style.
This kind of uneasy combination exists when it’s too difficult to make the item look like Liquid Glass at rest. The issue is that it still doesn’t meld together well.
Hopefully all of these issues can be ironed out by Apple in the coming months.