Apple today announced a series of improvements to Liquid Glass, the translucent design language the company introduced last year.
Apple said it has heard user feedback, which it "deeply appreciates," and is now making adjustments to the underlying foundations of how Liquid Glass is constructed. Chief among those changes is a new slider that lets users control transparency, ranging from fully opaque to completely clear.
Sidebar behavior is also being updated. Sidebars will now expand to the full edge of the window, with refraction effects continuing beneath them rather than cutting off at the sidebar boundary. Sidebar icons will also retain their color, a change that addresses a common complaint about the original Liquid Glass implementation.
Apple also announced updates to its app icon design language. Having redesigned all of its first-party icons last year to create a more consistent look across apps and platforms, the company said it is now taking that work further by incorporating additional layers of Liquid Glass directly into the icon artwork itself.
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The fact that they added a slider only shows that they’ve completely lost sight of the original idea what made Apple the design company. Apple has always been the company that designs the best possible solution. One so well thought out that the user simply uses it. The user shouldn’t be deciding how transparent the UI is; that’s the designer’s job. This is absolutely ridiculous.
What they should have done was simply admit that Liquid Glass was a bad design and fix it in iOS 27. Instead, they added a slider as a workaround.
The guy who originally came up with Liquid Glass left for Meta, the king of mindless doom-scrolling apps, so sometimes it almost feels like he deliberately made iOS 26 as awful as possible before leaving.
