Some good criticism of the mixed bag that comes with iOS 26 and its siblings.
It feels sleek, modern, impressive – at first sight.
Not even at first sight, I’d argue.
And about the ability to give all icons on the Home Screen the same color (which is already possible in iOS 18):
It takes five minutes to make it look good. It takes five seconds to turn it into visual chaos.
Of course, you could blame users for their choices, but I’d rather blame the system for making poor choices possible in the first place.
Isn’t putting in place good guardrails one of the principles of design? It’s not about nannying your users, but limiting their ability to make uninformed choices that would make their experience of a system.
As a side note, at my previous job I had a coworker who claimed that, as a designer, they preferred Android because, as a designer, they wanted more freedom to customize their phone’s interface. I bet that, as a designer, they’d have been pissed if someone said the same thing about something they’d designed. And, as a designer, their phone’s interface looked like Hello Kitty had pooped on it. (They were also fired unceremoniously a few months later, so I suspect that, as a designer, they weren’t that good.)
About the ability to reduce transparency, which Apple allows as a very-hard-to-discover accessibility toggle:
But that shouldn’t be a hidden extra.
It shouldn’t, and the additional issue is that reducing transparency turns the entire interface into a poor version of iOS 18.
I feel my own rant post starting to form in my head.