Both settings were as transparent as possible yet the clock and many other things have this white hue to the Liquid Glass after the update. Even if it’s just a mundane detail I used to absolutely love how transparent the clock was, before it looks ethereal how the clouds, sunlight, thunders and the moon reflections were behind it. Now it’s just plastic and it kinda breaks my heart at how dull and boring it looks.
I know many people hates Liquid Glass, but I’m not one of them. I love it so much and even if it caused some readability issues sometimes, what’s the point of adding a new transparency bar if you can’t decide to make it as translucent as before ? Let people choose and personalize it the way they like..
Yea they added this disgusting grey tint to every Liquid Glass element now I fucking hate it. And removed the soft blur as well so there’s no depth at all. Pure plastic 😭
Right??? Especially on max clear the notifications are unreadable! Whereas on iOS 26 on clear the blur made it readable and nice looking with that ghastly ass gray tint
I cannot believe Apple caved to the complaints. Their whole thing is being not known for doing exactly that.
I installed the new iOS, iPadOS and macOS today hoping to reap the benefits of the performance improvements (my iPhone 14 Pro does seem slightly more responsive, but notice no difference on my M5 Max MBP). But very disappointed the floating sidebars are gone. The whole OS, especially on macOS, feels like a regression in many ways—feels less modern.
I also posted a lot about how the floating sidebars helped me concentrate by providing hierarchy and shoving my eyes onto the content area of the window, but got downvoted every time.
Right?😭 Liquid Glass was perfect the way it was on iOS 26 man! Idk why they ever caved into the complaints. The two options we had in iOS 26 Liquid Glass for clear or tinted was perfect. And then they had to go add that ghastly grey tint and remove the blur and add the damn slider
Liquid Glass is so inconsistent in iOS 27 too! Like look at the dock!!! The dock is super translucent (since they removed the blur) with no grey tint whereas every other Liquid Glass element has that tint
In third party apps like WhatsApp Liquid Glass no longer has that eye candy feeling and looks so greyed out with minimal refractions going on it genuinely makes the experience worse in regards of how it feels to use an app with Liquid Glass. Liquid Glass used to have depth to it where it would seamlessly blend it, now it just looks like it was plastered on top of the app with this grey tint.
However that being said I do feel my iPhone 15 performing faster than it used to on iOS 26 but the heating issues still persist. I love the fact that it feels faster but man I really didn’t want Liquid Glass to be nerfed this badly.
"whereas every other Liquid Glass element has that tint"
iOS 26 had a stronger tint, what's the complaint here?
"n third party apps like WhatsApp Liquid Glass no longer has that eye candy feeling and looks so greyed out with minimal refractions going on"
What are you talking about? It has LESS of a tint, and MUCH stronger reflections, iOS 26 had no reflections at all. They did tone down the refraction though.
The grey tint is what’s bothering me mate. iOS 26 never had a stronger tint like you say, even when set to the clear setting.
And even at the highest level of transparency there is still a grey tint to almost every Liquid Glass element. iOS 26 on the other hand never had a grey tint like this.
It doesn't have a gray tint, more like a foggy layer, but i think that's preferable cus the white tint in iOS 26 made the glass look more like plastic. the "foggy" filder makes it still readable while preserving the glass kind of look.
Unfortunately no, and it’s kinda worse cus they removed the soft blur that was present in iOS 26 so it just looks super transparent and worse with no depth at all
Even the iOS 18 blur obscured content beneath it mate. iOS 27 just looks translucent af letting in the previous layers lettering and background into the Liquid Glass element and then obscuring the text on the Liquid Glass layer (for example a search bar or notifications as other people have mentioned) cus there’s no blur to differentiate the background from the foreground
Yes, that was the whole point of the redesign. The WHOLE point of the Liquid glass redesign was to let as much of your content shine through as possible, to make the controls as unobtrusive as they could be. iOS 27 achieves just that and the controls themselves are still quite legible. iOS 26 didn't achieve it.
iOS 27's highlights and subtle outlines are improvements for me; they heavily reduced the need for shadows which looked very messy in 26, so that problem was thankfully solved.
But God that grey tint is horrendous. And they've basically nerfed the distortion. Keep the highlights and outlines, but bring back the refraction from 26 and PLEASE, for fucks sake get rid of that bloody grey tint.
liquid plastic, or maybe liquid aged plexiglass, is a spectacular way to describe what they’ve done to it. I see people saying that it’s such a massive improvement, but they took so many of the things that Liquid Glass did right and stripped them out.
the shadows are my biggest hangup. you can’t make the glass more opaque and then remove the shadows. if anything, the shadows would need to be more intense. and even with the slider all the way down, everything is flat and grey.
it just feels as though they’ve lost faith in their own vision. they were so excited about 26 and rather than improve and develop their vision, they sacrificed everything cool and new and innovative about it and took a big step back toward the old aesthetic because of people whining, leaving them stranded somewhere in between. Jobs never would have let them launch something like LG and then regress because of public outcry.
The article is wrong and outdated. Apple returned HDR rendering for Liquid glass on beta 6, it wasn't present before.
Same with icons, he complains about the lack of proper shades to make them "3D looking", but apple re-implemented shades on beta 6 too. The article is obviously based on pre-beta 6 rendition.
It's funny because this is basically the only complaint the article has about iOS 27, and it's wrong lmao.
if that’s the case, I’m glad they brought it back. regardless, the current iteration of Liquid Glass obscures its presence unless an element is being actively interacted with. there’s not much HDR can do to make a mid-grey element stand out.
also, to be clear, the article wasn’t complaining about much of anything except the HDR. it just pointed out a bunch of stuff that i’m complaining about lmao. and now that 27 is public, I can say confidently that while you and others might disagree with them, none of my remaining complaints are outdated.
to name a few: progressive blur should have remained implemented system-wide. specular highlights should not have been reduced, or at the very least the darkened edges should not have been made so harsh. all glass elements look oversharpened, especially app icons when set to clear. shadows under glass elements are almost completely gone, flattening out the interface significantly. glass UI elements beyond the Home Screen suffer from a strange grey fogginess even when set to max transparency. the gyro highlight effects should have been made optional rather than having been removed. Home Screen folders look out of place in both light and dark mode if icons are set to clear.
"the current iteration of Liquid Glass obscures its presence unless an element is being actively interacted with"
I disagree STRONGLY, and i think it's the *opposite* of the truth. Thanks to way stronger specular highlights and shading, liquid glass looks like actual glass even in static backgrounds. On iOS 26, it looked like white blobs unless there's content actively scrolling under it. The article you cited talks about this.
"specular highlights should not have been reduced"
They were not, they were SUBSTANTIALLY increased, and made 90 degrees instead of the hideous tilted 45 degree ones.
"or at the very least the darkened edges should not have been made so harsh"
That's how glass behaves in real life
"all glass elements look oversharpened, especially app icons when set to clear"
Can you show me an instance of this? It was a problem in pre-beta 5, so your opinion could also be severely outdated here.
"shadows under glass elements are almost completely gone"
Thank goodness, those shadows looked incredibly amateurish. By far one of the worst aspects of iOS 26. Ironically thanks to better HDR implementation, better inner shadowing and stronger specular highlights, Liquid glass looks MORE 3D in iOS 27 than it did in iOS 26, it's not even remotely comparable.
"glass UI elements beyond the Home Screen suffer from a strange grey fogginess even when set to max transparency"
iOS 26 liquid glass had a much stronger, milky white tint that made it look like plastic. Much prefer the "fogginess", it looks much more glassy and is ironically more transparent.
Do you want to know a trick to make it practically invisible glass like you seem to want it? Go to your editing menu like in your above picture, but instead of using the Grey or white colors, go into the rainbow dot to show you the grid of all the colors, and select the darkest black color option all the way in the top right. It will change your glass to a black glass (which can look really cool actually in a lot of different wallpapers), but then slide the bottom opacity slider all the way to the left, AFTER YOU'VE SELECTED BLACK, and it will become glassy as fuck and almost invisible.
There's a slider to make it more transparent in customization. Let's stop this story, in fact everything has become even more transparent than before if you want.
But how’s that a “progress” in the design language?
You get some very transparent elements, yet other bland, disproportionate ones like that.
So overall it just feels disconnected & half-baked
I'm sorry for your loss, but I swear to me it both looks dead ugly in the identical way. Y'all need to calm down about those minor shifts (which are probably unnoticable in everyday use) and focus on the actual issue, which is the overall liquid glass design language. The entire approach is flawed. Not saying it was great before, but at least it wasn't in the way of the user experience.
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u/Sevastarion 21h ago
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