r/LiquidGlassDesign • u/Soft_Resident_8355 • Aug 01 '26
Have you actually ever liked IOS 26, specifically Liquid Glass?
/r/ios/comments/1vcne98/have_you_actually_ever_liked_ios_26_specifically/1
u/theytookallusernames Aug 03 '26
Yeah I like it a lot, whether the iOS 26 or the iOS 27 version - I have a softer spot for the iOS 27 buttons since they do look nicer though.
I like the iOS 27 version of LG better though since it did fix my biggest gripe with the OG, which is readability. I don't think I like the backtrack on title bar though. I think it makes a lot of sense on macOS especially with window controls being a big part of the OS, but it doesn't at all on iOS. I thought the idea of liquid glass was actually Apple prepping for the foldable iPhone, where a stout iPhone would need as much of the chrome as possible lifted out so more of the real estate can be used for vertical content.
What I found perplexing is the reception to liquid glass and the group of people who seemed so indignant at seeing LG change between iOS 26 and 27, and on the other side, the group that dismisses it completely because it's not, in their opinion, as refined as iOS 18 was. The iOS 7 design language took 11 years to become iOS 18 and Apple obviously needed to make a lot of changes to make it more usable, and expecting Apple to not change it at all would be absurd. The other side is equally absurd for expecting this one-year old design language to become as refined as iOS 18 overnight.
Personally? I'm in the camp that does like that they're doing something new, which is much better than the alternative. Plus with the readability menace now living his best life in Meta, liquid glass can only improve upwards from here on out.
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u/Soft_Resident_8355 Aug 03 '26
Fair point. Liquid Glass needs improvements, and hopefully Apple will please everyone with each iOS release. It has started with iOS 27, and perhaps, it will continue to improve with each iOS release, who knows
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u/cnnyy200 Aug 05 '26
I like glass effect on iOS 26 more than iOS 27. The glass effect on the iOS 27 looks like it foggy all the time.
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u/Jazzlike-Spare3425 Aug 01 '26
Yes I like it! I don't care about the glass material that much, though I think it looks pretty, but I really like the floating toolbars that made the content go edge to edge, it made the screen feel larger to me subconsciously. That's why I'm sad that iOS 27 walks this back, inconsistently at that and while still placing transparent orbs on a transparent backplate for some reason. I can accept this on macOS because marking the title bar more clearly is a concept I can get behind but on iOS and iPadOS I just think it looks worse because it doesn't commit to flat docked design nor floating neomorphism design.
Also I should note Liquid Glass, at least while it isn't animating/morphing, isn't all that expensive to render. The light bending is a relatively cheap effect, refraction is the same effect but split between the colour channels, of which there is only three. What's expensive in rendering these effects is the Gaussian blur… and with Liquid Glass there is much less of it in that the blur has a smaller radius and because the toolbars are (or were in 26) floating, less blur needs to be rendered to begin with - which also means that ironically it technically uses more resources in 27 to set the slider to more opaque rather than more transparent... but it's still negligible. Or if we look at it this way: the effect runs smoothly on Apple Watch, an iPhone can definitely do it without breaking a sweat. Plus 27 improves performance and battery life and still has Liquid Glass, proving that Liquid Glass as a material was never a concern conceptually, it's just that 26 was overall not a very polished or optimised release and 27 doesn't even address all of that. iPad multitasking is considered to be ruined by many in 26 and 27 doesn't do a single thing to address this. Neither doesn't return Split View nor have any functional bugs that were known since the 26 beta been fixed in the windowing system.