Apple aims for “more personal and expressive” iOS 26 with new Liquid Glass design

iOS 26 centers on a more fluid, dynamic user interface.

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[thawking]

Apple used to have a really good set of Human Interface Guidelines, and this violates pretty much all of them. it looks cool, i guess, but for a start, removing color from all the icons is an obvious backward step in distinguishing between them.

...lol ok so i actually went and looked up those guidelines, and it turns out they've been updated for Liquid Glass. unsurprisingly, the "Color" section is ... confusing.

the dek reads as follows, and as per the Wayback Machine, has done for quite some time: "Judicious use of color can enhance communication, evoke your brand, provide visual continuity, communicate status and feedback, and help people understand information."

BUT there's now a new section that reads: "Use color sparingly in Liquid Glass. To reduce visual noise, limit the amount of color you apply to the material, and to symbols or text on the material. If you apply color, reserve it for elements that truly benefit from emphasis, such as status indicators or key actions."

 

[Solidstate89]

The only thing I'm legitimately looking forward to with this update is the ability to filter calls and texts. I canceled my robokiller app because they spiked the price way up so to have something like this integrated will be really nice.

Beyond that, the new UX is pretty busy and hideous and all the AI shit is stuff I won't use even if I could which thankfully I don't have to worry about as my phone doesn't support that LLM garbage anyways.

 

[Xyler]

Liquid Glass branding aside...

I can't help but actually like the effect. If I had an iPhone, I'd try it out.

 

[Instant Sunrise]

Welcome back Aqua.

 

[Errum]

People have already questioned the "new" Messages feature in this thread, but how is this window tiling any different to what iPadOS already has?

It's not just tiling.

Windows from different apps are now resizable, stackable, can be overlapped, can be moved partially off screen, etc. Appears to be pretty much what a macOS or Win user would be used to on their laptop — this is big for many iPad users. Along with that comes more accessible file management, also important.

For people using their iPads mostly for content consumption, neither of these will matter much and can be ignored. But for professional and power users it'll be terrific.

There's also a lot of filling in iPadOS holes around the edges: the invaluable Preview app (from macOS); the Journal app (originally, inexplicably released only on iPhoneOS, WTF?); the ability to make phone calls on the iPad.

 

[gijames1225]

I sort of feel bad for consumer OS designers. Because OSes work pretty well. They aren't perfect, but they're pretty good. They crash almost never. Their security is not perfect, but not the spectacular horribleness it was a decade ago. Things just work. Both hardware and software, things really do work well. (I'm sure there are those will disagree with me, but you go figure out how to get X-Wing running on a system with a SoundBlaster card, printer, joystick, and network card first, and then come back and tell me how horrible things are.)

But it's hard to convince people to buy new hardware, or new software, when what they have works pretty well. And OS developers would like to stay employed, and it's hard to do that when you're fixing edge cases that a minisucle percent of the population will ever encounter.

So we're at the fashion industry part of the cycle, where things get changed randomly, only the newest hardware can support the latest shiny thing, and you hope enough people will need bellbottoms, or whatever this year's hot new trend is.

Yeah, was thinking about this the other day. I use both Mac and Windows, and have few complaints about either (Windows 11 start menu is dumb, but I don't use it; Finder drives me up a wall, but it ultimately gets the job done with a bit more fiddling than I like). I haven't encountered a real crash or corruption in a decade or more, and both just get the job done.

OSes are no longer exciting, and that's wonderful.

 

[Little-Zen]

I remember playing with "liquid glass" in Linux (KDE?) ~15 years ago.

project looking glass, maybe?

 

[solomonrex]

Sarcasm or not, that is entirely plausible.

It would save lives, actually.

 

[feoh]

As a partially blind person this announcement fills me with dread. I have been feeling like my iPhone's utility has dropped consistently over the last few years, and this will push it over the edge into total unusability unless I can turn this disaster OFF.

Ask any person with any kind of visual disability what they think of transparency/glass effects of any kind. You'll get a very consistent answer I'd think.

 

[feoh]

Yeah, was thinking about this the other day. I use both Mac and Windows, and have few complaints about either (Windows 11 start menu is dumb, but I don't use it; Finder drives me up a wall, but it ultimately gets the job done with a bit more fiddling than I like). I haven't encountered a real crash or corruption in a decade or more, and both just get the job done.

OSes are no longer exciting, and that's wonderful.

Totally agree.

I tried installing Fedora 42 KDE on my desktop yesterday. It hard locked every other minute, and I found myself thinking "Why? Why am I infliciting this pain upon myself for no reason?" and went back to being quite happy with Windows 11+WSL

(I know Linux brings a LOT of people joy, and I'm happy for them, I really am. I love open source and run Linux on a TON of servers both around my house and for work, but for desktop use? Not for me - BECAUSE - desktop operating systems just aren't all that exciting anymore.)

 

[Tam-Lin]

Throughout the keynote, the presenters employed the same odd syntax: “X has never been more Y”, as in “Icons have never been more beautiful“. The intent of this Madison Avenue language is to imply improvement when nothing significant is improving.

The entire presentation should be seen as this: “We can’t get Siri to keep up with its AI competitors, and in the face of our humiliation we need to distract you with shiny things.“

It‘s not quite rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic; it’s more like rearranging the deck chairs on a really boring cruise to nowhere.

How are they not keeping up with AI competitors? When it comes to interacting with something, do you want something that does amazing things 90% of the time, and completely screws up the other 10%, or do you want something that works OK 100% of the time? There are tradeoffs, and Apple often/usually errs on the side of consistency.

 

[dfiler]

Haven't we been here before with transparency? Did they forget why background shading exists again?

 

[doalwa]

Gotta admit...I threw up in my mouth a little when I saw that first screenshot...as long as it's optional, it's fine, I guess. I just wish they'd stop changing things around just for the sake of it...but I guess you gotta keep thousands of software engineers busy somehow....

 

[ghostofchristmas]

I don’t understand - why would Apple think de-emphasizing the INFORMATION-bearing part of the display in favor of the NON-information-bearing background? How do they think that is good?

Because something that looks cool and different in TV ads help sells new hardware.

 

[Vospier]

As a longtime Metro UI fan I’m so ready for this Aero phase to be over. At least it’s optional for now.

 

[AlexanderO]

Am I the only one who thinks this is cool??? Look guys I miss Windows Aero it looked great. I did not like it back in the day due to performance issues but it was stunning.
Maybe I am just a sucker for nostalgia but this is something I am looking forward to

 

[tangible]

How are they not keeping up with AI competitors? When it comes to interacting with something, do you want something that does amazing things 90% of the time, and completely screws up the other 10%, or do you want something that works OK 100% of the time? There are tradeoffs, and Apple often/usually errs on the side of consistency.

I don’t need “amazing things”. I just said to Siri, “What’s today’s weather?”. After the answer I said, “And what about tomorrow?” Instead of tomorrow‘s weather I got a complete non sequitor. The amazing thing is that after years of development Siri can’t handle something so basic.

From wrist to desktop I and my family have every class of Apple product. I’m not loyal per se, but I’m deeply committed. I’m not going anywhere, so it’s important to me for Apple to keep up.

I stay in a lot of hotels. Taking a shower is often a challenge, because the faucet designers all wanted to be innovative. There are only a few real decisions – how much water, what temperature, what pipe – but dozens of arbitrarily different ways to choose. That’s what many of the changes in 26 feel like to me, thus my comment.

 

[SPCagigas]

I suggest that for next year they roll out "true translucency" as their next big feature, using the phone's rear cameras to show you the real world behind the phone and overlay the enitre UI on top of that.

/s

You joke, but I kinda like that idea

 

[SPCagigas]

At this point, I'm convinced that UI/UX, much like fashion, is simply one giant circular construct of ideas that get re-cycled for the next generation every decade or two. Up next will be the return of Parachute Pants and Skeuomorphism.

It's a pendulum, and it has to be, otherwise we'll run out of employed UI/UX designers.

 

[barich]

View attachment 111241
Are they trying to make this shit as difficult to parse in a single glance?

This is the epitome of form over function. Cover up the clock so you can only see a portion of it. How elegant!

Then, make everything else as blurry and uncontrasty as possible. It's like Aero Glass turned up to 11, when it really needed to have been turned down to like 6 in Vista in the first place.

 

[barich]

I mean, it's literally been more than a decade since the last UI overhaul. 12 years, actually. If the designers are actually keeping their jobs only to redo the UI every 12 years, by extension that would mean they're getting paid for ~10-11 years to do nothing.

There's "change for the sake of change" and then there's "trying a new direction once a decade." The latter hardly seems egregious.

That said, some of the screenshots... yikes.

Things move around all of the time. No, they haven't revamped the entire UI like they did from iOS 6 to 7, but there are enough changes in every major version that my parents have to ask me something.

At some point intuitiveness in UIs stopped being a thing anyone cared about. We're a long way from a button that said "Start" and an arrow pointing at it that said "click here to begin." Now we have vaguely shaped icons with no text that sometimes don't even remotely indicate what they're for. Look at the "share" button, for example. It's really more of a general menu button these days, but how are you supposed to know that until you know that?

 

[sonicmerlin]

Wow they’re really leaning into a full fledged computer paradigm. Any chance they could bring back 3D icons?

 

[zogus]

Am I the only one who thinks this is cool??? Look guys I miss Windows Aero it looked great. I did not like it back in the day due to performance issues but it was stunning.
Maybe I am just a sucker for nostalgia but this is something I am looking forward to

I neither liked or disliked it, but I did think that it was a big improvement over the Fisher-Price design language of Luna.