Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26

Summary

With iOS 26, Apple seems to be leaning harder into visual design and decorative UI effects — but at what cost to usability? 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. Let’s strip back the frost and look at how these changes affect real use. Liquid Glass: Apple’s New Visual Language iOS 26 introduces Apple’s new glassmorphic visual language into its phones. Apple describes Liquid Glass as: “a translucent material that reflects and refracts its surroundings, while dynamically transforming to help bring greater focus to content, delivering a new level of vitality across controls, navigation, app icons, widgets, and more.” Translated: the interface now ripples and shimmers as if your phone were encased in Jell-O. At first glance, it does look cool. But problems arise as soon as you start using your phone. Transparency = Hard to See Liquid Glass makes UI elements translucent and bubbly. The result is light, airy — and often invisible. One of the oldest findings in usability is that anything placed on top of something else becomes harder to see. Yet here we are, in 2025, with Apple proudly obscuring text, icons, and controls by making them transparent and placing them on top of busy backgrounds. Text on top of images is a bad idea because the contrast between the text and the background is often too low. So why does Apple now encourage users to set photos as backgrounds for text messages? Apple Messages: iOS 26 encourages users to choose a background image for text messages. Doing so makes it substantially harder to read the text or easily notice other content, such as photos. Or even discover the input field (not to speak of the in-field placeholder iMessage). The result is that your friend’s words are camouflaged against their beach-vacation photo, or worse, their pet’s fur. Content may technically be “in focus,” but you can’t read (or see) it. Apple Maps: Icons...