I hope they release a version of these fixes on iOS 18 in a form installable on an iPhone 14; I've been trying to stay away from Liquid Glass until it's actually usable. I really don't want to be forced to upgrade, since Apple seems to have replaced UX testing with "just ship it," as has become standard in the industry.
> I've been trying to stay away from Liquid Glass until it's actually usable.
This sounds overly dramatic. You may not like the design but its 100% usable.
I find some parts of Liquid Glass to be an improvement over the previous flat style that lasted far too long. A lot of it seems really well thought out.
On mobile that is.
On larger screens with desktops and overlapping windows it looks kind of bad. Not unusable, just annoying. I am hoping this will change as more apps update their design.
It's about 60% as usable. Weird and distracting jiggling makes it hard to target where the button will be.
Also the placement of buttons and functionality is completely scattered around the UIs, which severely reduces usability. What do all the mystery meat buttons do now? One has to relearn all the UX. There's a ton of improvement needed, it's about first-draft level quality.
Dark mode UI elements are almost invisible too, frequently.
It has a "my first redesign project" feel everywhere. On macOS I upgraded right away and it was a huge downgrade on performance. On iPhone I waited until 26.2, and merely had to suffer far lower usability.
What does % usable even mean?
Tell that to my keyboard that doesn't show up half the time and the other half covers random parts of the app
Indeed, based on all the “look at that, you can’t even read xyz” screenshots around release time I thought it will be really bad. Upgraded and…it’s fine. After a week you don’t notice anything and the old OS will look dated. Just like every design change and any product that causes a lot of noise in the first week.
On the Mac it’s much rougher than on iOS.
Performance of iOS 26 on some iPhones isn't great. Sure, a lot of people complain because they don't like change, but we shouldn't ignore the performance issues and poor legibility on some elements. Those are valid complaints.
Agreed that there are more rough edges on Mac, but even then, I've been using Tahoe for months now and it's been fine. I hear podcasters saying that they're just skipping the entire Tahoe cycle and waiting until this fall's OS and I just don't get it.
I am a newer iPhone user (2 years now) and I am of the same opinion as you. I see so many people crying foul, that their phone is now unusable, but I’m just hear going “eh it’s uglier” and continuing. Curious what OP thinks is fundamentally broken.
Now I have heard about issues on MacOS and things but not really anything around the phone.
Something I've heard from someone that owns an iPhone 16 Pro is that animations are (were?) laggy sometimes. I was also looking at some pictures on an iPhone the other day (unsure about the model, maybe 14?) and it felt like it was dropping some frames while switching apps.
So while it may not be fundamentally broken, it's the type of stuff that would annoy me a lot if I used an iPhone. I never expect to go from smooth experience to a low-end Android phone experience after a software update.
MacOS... I've avoided upgrading my M4 Max MBP so far after upgrading the M1 Air we have at home. It's just not as smooth as before, even with reduced transparency.
iPhone 16 Pro and Apple TV and Apple Watch have all become noticeably slower/laggier with choppy animation under 26. Totally unacceptable.
I'm fine with the design, just want my phone to stop freezing up and glitching out.
It's usable. It is also noticeably slower on my iPhone 13, even after turning on "reduce transparency."
Reduce motion, that will help
They won't, it already didn't happen for 18.7.4 and 18.7.3 (only via beta channel for the latter), and the present fixes are being released as 18.7.5 for the iPhone XS/XR. Still I think that staying on iOS 18 is the lesser evil.
Liquid Glass looks pretty from a distance, but my biggest gripe with the design language is just how difficult so many things become to read or interact with. Given that the whole raison d'être of liquid glass is transparent effects, the options to limit that or otherwise increase contrast simply do not go far enough. I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable.
My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.
> “My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.”
I’m optimistic that they will eventually course correct on Liquid Glass, but we’ll have to wait until iOS/macOS 27, or perhaps longer.
There are parallels to Apple’s butterfly keyboard fiasco on the hardware side. Sleek looking on the surface but an objective step backwards in usability. Unfortunately it took Apple several years to reverse course on that one.
> There are parallels to Apple’s butterfly keyboard fiasco on the hardware side.
There are also parallels with the original pinstripes-and-transparency-everywhere aqua UI. I am also optimistic that it will be toned down over time but retaining the responsiveness.
My biggest frustrations with it aren't even related to the look of things, its the all around disregard for user experience. The new screenshot UX on iOS is an insanely bad downgrade.
I think it makes sense. They refocused it on sharing or extracting information from screenshots. Which is what people want more than saving them to the camera roll. Being able to copy text or translate the text in a screenshot is super useful.
Just go to Settings > General > Screen Capture, and turn off Full-Screen Previews - which fully restores the previous behaviour.
Personally I prefer the new behaviour.
But eitherways: it’s just an option.
The Windows ME/Fisher Price look. I can get past the drag handle problem. It's like every window is now the damn ios simulator.
They almost certainly will course-correct in the next release now that the culprit responsible for Liquid Glass is no longer at the company. But they won't chuck it out wholesale; it will be a gradual evolution back to sanity.
They reacted pretty quickly to the butterfly keyboard fiasco. By the time users received the shipping products of the first gen, the second gen were already in the pipeline so there was a slightly modified with only a dust cover being added. There was no third gen.
Hopefully iOS 26.x releases will continue to correct Liquid Glass, but I'm guessing iOS 27 is well down the path with it still integrated. Maybe iOS 28 will see sanity return???
Second gen butterfly keyboard broke a lot too. And then there was the no-esc touch bar, and the removal of inverted-T arrow keys... It took a few years of no good mac laptops before they backpedalled enough to get back to where they started
I’m pretty sure butterfly keyboard was made worse when it came to the hotter rubbing higher power Mac’s. I rarely saw folks with the original 12” low power model having issues.
It was not an entirely bad concept for the device it was conceived for, but Apple has a habit of unifying their technologies to all their products and sometimes, like with Liquid Glass, that seriously doesn’t work.
> I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable.
I mean, "computing power" in a literal sense maybe, but does that matter if it doesn't translate to either "workload contention" or "electrical power"?
I think the Liquid Glass effects, similar to smooth scrolling, are mostly just running as pixel shaders on a spare tile of one of the SoC's GPU's Streaming Processors — a tile that likely likely would have been idle-but-burning-power-anyway, given that GPU power management occurs on the level of entire SPs. It's the same reason that ProMotion "smooth viewport scrolling" doesn't really cost anything.
Workload contention. My iPhone 17 visibly struggles to render components with evident lagging - this is user-noticeable, if it were all done by an otherwise spare core I wouldn’t notice these things.
AFAICT, the steady-state Liquid Glass effects (think: the address bar in Safari, staying static itself while you scroll the page under it) cost nothing. That's what I meant above.
Animating the Liquid Glass widgets (i.e. changing their position or shape), on the other hand, does seem to cost a lot / produce lag.
I get the impression that this is down to the UI toolkit not being optimized for whatever Liquid Glass is doing in terms of recalculating constraints during animations. (When the GPU overruns its time budget while computing shaders for the compositor, the visual effect is of [double-buffered] texture buffers dropping/repeating frames, not slowdown. Actual "lag" in a GPU-composited UI is either from CPU work, or from one-shot CUDA-type GPU "prerender jobs".)
I get the sense that Apple rushed out some shitty code that has some of these components re-evaluating a bunch of their placement and sizing constraints on every non-static animation frame (rather than just giving the Liquid Glass shaders the ability to do declarative tweens.)
Or maybe the shaders already do declarative tweens, but Apple are doing tons of redundant on-CPU per-frame recalculations, to re-do any constraint-based layout for everything around the component during the animation, that might be impacted by the component's current tweened state. I dunno.
Either way, it's definitely silly, and could be re-engineered to work a lot better.
But it's also not really "Liquid Glass's fault" (i.e. something inherent to the visual design); it's just (AFAICT) bad implementation engineering, rushed to give Apple something to talk about besides its failure to launch Apple Intelligence.
It's a very complicated system. Performance issues are bad but they're not necessarily caused by how the UI looks.
You can report an issue by typing applefeedback:// into Safari if you want.
And even if they reserved a core, that would be a waste of a perfectly good core
> I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable
Sounds like you need to spend some money for a new Apple device! /s
Updated my 13 mini. Performance is fine / maybe better.. but battery. Tanked. How true is the ‘it takes days for reindexing’ statement?
I recommend installing liquid glass on iOS. It actually has been looking good on there since 26.2. Macs have been godawful with liquid glass.
Doesn't look like it. It looks like it's only iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR
https://support.apple.com/en-us/126347
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