Apple’s new Liquid Glass interface’s biggest problem? It’s not weird enough

Macworld

The dust has settled, and another WWDC keynote is over. And in some ways I’m relieved, because the rumored cross-platform interface redesign turned out not to be quite as radical as some of us feared.

But my feelings about Liquid Glass are complicated. Yes, it looks nice. No, in most cases (the Apple Watch’s Workout app being the most obvious exception), Apple doesn’t seem to have messed too much with the navigational structure and location of controls, so the updated operating systems shouldn’t be too confusing to use. But, at the risk of sounding contrary, I’m worried that the aesthetics aren’t weird enough, and that the pleasant looks are a sign that Apple has looked to the present rather than the future for its visual inspiration.

Let me explain.

The good kind of bad design

It would be an understatement to say that the logo for the 2012 London Olympics, featuring the year in a stylized font, was controversial. At its 2007 unveiling, the design firm’s chairman overheard a journalist openly describing it as “f–king awful.” Newspapers ran competitions to come up with something better. Almost 80 percent of respondents to a BBC poll gave it the lowest available rating: not gold, not silver, not even bronze, but “wooden spoon.”

To anyone who looked at it, it was weird. Some people said the logo bore an unfortunate resemblance to two cartoon characters doing something rude. But the logo’s trick was that its look–jagged, angular, garish–was simply ahead of its time. The 2007 designers had consciously created something that would resonate in five years’ time. The London Olympics logo fit nicely with the aesthetic trends of 2012, and by the time the Olympics rolled around, the logo was viewed with fondness.

Compare that to iOS 7, which even after this week remains undefeated as Apple’s most controversial operating system. Released in 2013, it struck unsuspecting iPhone owners as brash, gaudy, weirdly flat, and totally unfamiliar. Which was exactly what was needed in order to begin a new chapter in the iPhone’s story. iOS 7 looked weird in 2013, normal in 2015, and was still holding up (with a few tweaks) in 2025. That’s forward-looking design, the sort of radical leap forward that enables you to be consistent for long periods the rest of the time.

Now there’s iOS 26, which looks pleasant and inoffensive right now. It’s nice, but it’s a 2025 (or earlier) aesthetic: all transparency effects and shiny specular highlights. You don’t need to project yourself into an imagined future for it to make sense. One of my colleagues said it was reminiscent of the Sky Glass rebrand from 2021. Another argued that the mimicry of physical materials harks back to the skeuomorphic conventions that existed before iOS 7 came along.

The point is that by adopting a glasslike aesthetic, Apple isn’t leading the design conversation, it’s simply giving users what they’re already used to. Glassmorphism is a popular UI style at the moment, but it was identified as a trend as early as 2020. This is fine for the time being, but suggests that Liquid Glass might start to appear dated far sooner than iOS 7’s 12-year lifespan. And software interfaces are not like ads and other marketing materials. You want to change them as rarely as possible.




Mert Erdir

The three measures of success

To my mind, there are three criteria for success when it comes to a software interface: in descending order of importance, these are practicality, familiarity, and attractiveness. Liquid Glass does well on the last count, I would say, even if the attraction is short-lived. But there are question marks over the other two.

As I said at the start of this article, iOS 26 and the other new operating systems announced at WWDC 2025 are a lot less unfamiliar than I feared they would be. They obviously look different from their predecessors, but the differences are mostly cosmetic rather than fundamental. Take away the Liquid Glass effect, and the structure beneath is largely the same. You won’t have to retrain your muscle memory very much. You’ll just have to get used to some new effects. iOS 26 will be unfamiliar to many iPhone users who download it in September, but not in ways that will be difficult to deal with.

Practicality is an even bigger worry. The glassmorphic effects that look so smart in Apple’s marketing videos are proving distracting and faintly ridiculous in the real world, with numerous beta testers posting mocking screenshots and videos to social media. Notification Center is impossibly busy with glass layers over glass layers, all competing for your attention: it’s the opposite of focus. And all these animations and visual effects are making demands on your processor and battery that seem completely unnecessary. Had Apple created something a bit weirder, maybe people would have embraced it, but even in the best situations, Liquid Glass doesn’t seem to be worth the potential problems it brings.

It’s (extremely) early days, of course, and many of the less user-friendly aspects of iOS 26 and its siblings on the Mac, Apple Watch, and so on will be ironed out before public launch. By the time the 26.1 updates come out in late October or thereabouts, the interfaces should be buttery smooth and largely free from flaws. We’ll also have had time to get used to them, and the moderately unfamiliar should have become thoroughly familiar. Life will be easier. But I suspect that, in time, Apple may regret that its “broadest software design update ever” was not a little more daring and, well, weirder.




Foundry

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

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The rumor mill

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Software updates, bugs, and problems

It’s not just you: The iOS 18.5 Mail app is having a problem delivering mail.

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