Apple offered Liquid Glass in June 2025 in a self-declared try to deliver “joy and delight to every user experience”. The visible design taste – which is being implemented to all Apple merchandise from iPhone to observe to TV – is called for the corporate’s new form of display designed to seem like translucent liquid.
Status out through design has been paramount for Apple ever since Steve Jobs co-founded the corporate part a century in the past. He was once fast to kill off each uninspired thought, mentioning: “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
Jobs’ management taste may just verge at the tyrannical, but his way was once very important to Apple’s enduring good fortune, which, greater than 14 years after his demise, nonetheless ranks as the arena’s most dear logo.
To Jobs, the dual significance of design aesthetics and consumer revel in (UX) was once non-negotiable – each should be easiest for the general public to look the product. However the contemporary historical past of Liquid Glass – offered underneath Jobs’ successor as CEO, Tim Prepare dinner – suggests Apple might now be shedding that ethos.
Upon Liquid Glass’s legitimate unlock closing September, many purchasers criticised the design of Apple’s new working gadget (referred to as OS 26). Social media was once inundated with lawsuits about its sluggish or nonsensical animations, distracting color shifts, over the top interactions, cartoonish or blurry icons, deficient distinction, inconsistent highlighting, and battery-hungry results that have been too delicate to be well worth the trouble.
A evaluation through the UX consultancy NN/g was once equivocal at perfect: “At first glance, the system looks fluid and modern. But try to use it, and soon those shimmering surfaces and animated controls start to get in the way.”
Stressed out mag known as the brand new gadget “awful”, concluding: “People don’t enjoy forking over data and dollars in exchange for annoyance.”
An advent to Liquid Glass. Video: Apple.
With OS 26 and Liquid Glass, Apple opted to throw away most of the interactions that its customers had spent years ingraining into their motor purposes. Deficient usability feels unforgivable for an organization constructed on Jobs’ mantra: “It works like magic.” It seems that, it didn’t.
Apple’s tricky 2025 culminated within the unexpected departure of its vice-president of human interface design, Alan Dye, to important tech rival Meta in December.
The place did Apple move fallacious?
As a senior lecturer in UX design, I’ve faithful a lot of my skilled lifestyles to working out how and why virtual interactions form the best way we are living and our client behaviour. Small interactions subject.
Central to the criticisms of Liquid Glass has been OS 26’s deficient usability – particularly, how the “transparency” of Liquid Glass made the whole lot laborious for plenty of customers to learn.
Even all the way through its pre-launch beta trying out, Apple realised its new design had some problems, pushing design adjustments to cut back the transparency results on notification backgrounds, as an example. At the iPhone, the (very) clear components regarded excellent on some inventory wallpapers – however have been broadly rated unusable on others.
The primary replace, two months after the legitimate September 2025 release, let customers disable Liquid Glass’s transparency to extend legibility. However through lowering transparency and blurs on some backgrounds, the consumer revel in additionally become extra sterile.
There’s nonetheless masses to respect in Liquid Glass’s design and capability. When the usage of my iPhone, as an example, I in finding the “glass bubble” magnifying glass impact all the way through textual content variety exquisitely decadent.
The ‘glass bubble’ magnifying glass impact on iPhone iOS26.
Christopher J. Parker
But all of the whilst, the nice German dressmaker Dieter Rams’ 10th concept haunts me: “Good design is as little design as possible.” Jony Ive, Apple’s design guru for greater than twenty years, primarily based virtually all the iPhone’s authentic aesthetic on Rams’ designs.
Liquid Glass’s usability problems develop into (actually) clearest once I make a selection the “clear” homescreen surroundings – a flagship visible aesthetic in Apple’s promotional subject material. Now not most effective is it laborious to learn, however the app icons develop into virtually indistinguishable.
Each time I have a look at my display on this mode, I believe ache from the loss of color and muddiness of the icons mixing into the background (I will be able to’t in finding the WhatsApp icon!). Settling on the “wrong” roughly wallpaper, comparable to a photograph of my kid on vacation, compounds the problem.
It feels a bizarre determination to let customers eliminate the core color alerts that experience underpinned Apple’s remarkable usability for goodbye. After someday I will be able to now not take the ache, switching again to the default color surroundings.
Liquid Glass transparent display choices at the iPhone.
Christopher J. Parker
What’s subsequent for Liquid Glass?
I consider Liquid Glass’s design and UX problems are symptomatic of wider cultural problems at Apple. Dye’s departure got here laborious at the heels of the announcement of John Giannandrea’s retirement – the British device engineer who presided over the corporate’s AI chatbot gadget, Apple Intelligence.
Like Liquid Glass, this has to this point didn’t sign excellence, having been unfavourably when put next with competitors comparable to Google Gemini and ChatGPT since its (behind schedule) 2024 advent.
Those management shifts come at a time when, consistent with one UK survey, 69% of shoppers want extra inexpensive good merchandise – a marketplace now smartly served through Chinese language manufacturers. The place as soon as manufacturers comparable to Oppo copied Apple mercilessly, now they’re generating extremely unique handsets.
Solving Liquid Glass’s flaws will occur – I’ll put cash on March’s OS 27 unlock making the important changes. However the necessity for them betrays an underlying drawback: Apple is fallible. Whilst a unmarried deficient design determination can also be addressed, the development of underwhelming UX is eroding Apple’s luxurious standing.
Apple’s core philosophy of perfectionism will have to be non-negotiable. What it wishes now’s a bolder imaginative and prescient for the best way other people will engage with its merchandise in long run, now not simply but any other new aesthetic. To cite the American ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, as Jobs was once keen on doing: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
