I’ve been considering writing my own assessment of Liquid Glass (beyond calling it an abomination), but while we wait for that to happen, here are a few quotes:
One of the oldest findings in usability is that anything placed on top of something else becomes harder to see. Yet here we are, in 2025, with Apple proudly obscuring text, icons, and controls by making them transparent and placing them on top of busy backgrounds.
Safari piles on with its own frustrations: the URL bar is squeezed between icons, truncated to the point where you can’t easily tell what site you’re on. And tabs, once a single tap away, are now hidden in an overflow ellipsis menu that demands extra steps. Not only does this design violate best practices for overflow menu (which requires that only nonessential actions be hidden there), but every additional tap is another second wasted — multiplied by the millions of times users switch tabs each day.
iOS 26 brings Liquid Glass controls laid over noisy backgrounds, jittery animated buttons, shrunken and crowded tab bars, collapsing navigation, and ubiquitous search bars. On top of that, it breaks long‑established iOS conventions, getting closer to Android design.
Overall, Apple is prioritizing spectacle over usability, lending credibility to the theory that Liquid Glass is an attempt to distract customers from iOS 26’s lack of long-promised AI features.
This last one makes me 🤣 of course, because the idea that customers are impatiently waiting for Apple Intelligence to become good is ludicrous. Replace “customers” with “shareholders”, and that sentence will be more accurate.