This beautifully summed up a lot of what I've been thinking about Liquid Glass since I first saw it. A lot of it doesn't really make sense - in an effort to make usability clearer, they are designing everything to look the same and create more empty space for... vibes?
As the years have gone on, it feels like computers are slowly losing every ounce of personality they once had. Software should be delightful to use! Computers felt fun! I'm hoping we eventually get through this minimal/bland era of UI design and come back around to design with a little creativity.
It feels like Apple is trying to subtly introduce the concept of spatial UI for the future, where the norm will be to have controls and content on separate "layers" - but I don't think it should come at a cost of sacrificing the interfaces we already have.
I see the same sort of thing happening in housing, and I think it's because the nature of the thing has changed.
Houses used to be for families; they were often quirky or strange or emergent, with weird layouts or materials. They may have garish wallpapers or floor to ceiling wood panelling. But these touches were reflective of the personalities of the owners. They met the needs of the specific people who inhabited them.
Nowadays, as houses are more of a commodity, they must be generic. All flat white interiors, straight corners, no cornicing or archetraves or plasterwork or anything to give the home a unique character. Instead it must be a blank canvas such that any inhabitant can put his own things inside it to make it his.
Computers are the same; what was once a niche product for enthusiasts and businesses has now become an instrumental part of nearly every moment of nearly everyone's lives. Thus they also must be generic and same-y, with limited avenues for superficial customisation, so that they can be interchanged or upgraded without jarring the user against the new version or device.
Personally I prefer radical customisation and quirkiness. I find it charming. But it seems that those who are designing (or perhaps only selling) the things disagree with me.
Not that I have much of a bone in this fight - I already own a home and don’t plan to ever move (which makes this especially easy for me to say) but generic, identical housing is probably going to be essential moving forward. One of the reasons we haven’t found a way to make home construction faster is because every single project is about as unique as can be.
Not to mention, there are still billions of people needing housing, and with the climate situation we’re already in, building billions of unique homes will make the problem a LOT worse.
Again, I don’t really care much about the issue, but I just think it’s worthwhile to remind people that the American way of life (which developing nations aspire to) is absolutely untenable as far as all modern as currently-feasible technology is concerned. Maybe we could live with not being expressive just on the outside of our houses specifically?
The solution here is to build more higher-density housing options. Tokyo has very affordable real estate because dwellings are appropriately-sized for dense urban lifestyles and are nearly uniformly mixed-use buildings with retail space on ground floors and residence/office above. Combine this with lax zoning and you have a recipe for affordable housing.
Comparing this to my own city of Melbourne, Australia: high-density dwellings are generally constrained to innercity suburbs and are still seen as undesirable compared to free-standing homes or semi-detached houses. Councils restrict the development of new high-density or mixed-use buildings for what amounts to NIMBYism. Inadequate public transport in the growth areas of the Northern and Western suburbs increases dependence on roads and freeways.
There are options to support affordable living in cities that don't involve covering our farmland and wildlife reserves with uniform white plaster cubes.
I agree wholeheartedly with some of your premises. Melbourne zoning, public transport, uniform white plaster cubes. All need unconditional improvement and some of it is simple rule changing to allow better solutions.
I contend other aspects of your ideas are not bad but need some work.
> The solution here is to build more higher-density housing options.
and
> undesirable compared to free-standing homes or semi-detached houses.
Any good idea for housing won't please everyone. In this case, when you see anything about the rich and famous are they likely to live in "high density" the way developers think of it?
space is desirable. Space you control (rent vs own.. another can of worms.) even more so! High density housing may help - any bloody action at all would be nice - but it isn't what people desire.
As for "covering our farmland and wildlife reserves"... Australia is a huge country and comparatively tiny population as yet. There is a looooong way to go before a significant area of the country is covered. However I would argue that we don't try to have a continuously expanding population - which would also help with housing costs.
I have mixed feeling on "NIMBYism" too. On the one hand we need solutions for people. On the other hand, the general idea of "people chasing happiness" means they should be free to oppose actions too. You can characterise it as a class battle of the rich opposing solutions to homelessness but usually each such situation is not clear cut, usually being muddied by developer profiteering too.
To throw another idea in there.. why is it that all the infrastructure monies are being spent in our capital cities? We have a crap ton of towns in the countryside - many of which are dying or barely holding steady. Why can't they grow at similar % as Melbourne? Where are the jobs there? After COVID they got a shot in the arm but it wasn't sustained.
> In this case, when you see anything about the rich and famous are they likely to live in "high density" the way developers think of it?
There are an awful lot of exceptionally wealthy people living in buildings in Manhattan with hundreds of apartments. Their apartments themselves are larger than average, but given how much they cost per square foot there’s clearly a lot of demand to live in that environment.
I imagine so! I wasn't trying to say apartment living is ultimately undesirable. But when there is the money to do it, that apartment has more space.
Basically, money = space. In the city, you need more money. In the suburbs you need less. There also other concerns like commute and facilities but that varies person to person.
For many people, the tradeoff to live in the suburb is the right decision because the other factors don't matter so much and so to get more space for their $ they choose suburb.
Does that mean high density housing is bad? Absolutely not! If there are people that want to live in X space for Y money then go for it. But that applies to suburbs too. Once you involve money there are developers/builders and rent/own issues however my general take is that higher density building are impeded by rules and regulations more than a lack of demand. I have nothing to really back that up though.
> Tokyo has very affordable real estate because dwellings are appropriately-sized for dense urban lifestyles and are nearly uniformly mixed-use buildings with retail space on ground floors and residence/office above
I thought being early to the low-birth-rate party, culturally valuing new construction more than "old bones" or whatever (preventing sitting on real estate), and a low-growth economy over the last ~100 years were much more relevant contributing factors than the type of construction they've prioritized
Some of the similarities are because of the need to produce at cheapest options.
But much, much more are because people have too much an eye on resale value, and if your house is different from all the rest, you reduce your buyer pool.
It costs nearly nothing to make kitchen cabinet heights comfortable for the main user; almost nobody does this even on full custom builds.
Yeah we need those identical brutalist and easy to build concrete housing estates like on A Clockwork Orange. Or a cookie cutter surrealist hellscape like in Edward Scissor hands. Sounds lovely.
> so that they can be interchanged or upgraded without jarring the user against the new version or device
I suppose this is a big point. I used to spend hours... days really... setting up a new PC. Partly because it would take ages just to get everything off the various floppy disks and CD-ROMs and installed onto the HDD, but also because everything was quirky.
Nowadays I hew to the default install of Ubuntu (or Windows + WSL2) and replacing my device (or SSD) or upgrading the OS is basically a seemless experience. I have some .bashrc/git config/etc stuff I can grab quickly and then I'm basically good to go.
I agree, and I'm frustrated this is the new big update because it seems like liquid glass ate up most of the energy that might have gone to a real major feature. Not only is it just UI changes, it looks worse.
I liked Liquid Glass when I first saw it. I don't especially like the whole flat look everyone has had going the past few years so I was really looking forward to a refresh.
I downloaded the beta and the more I use it the less I like it. The icons are blurry, washed out and look terrible overall. I have a difficult time using the buttons on the lock screen to activate the flashlight and camera. Most of the time, I push them and the lock screen customization screen comes up instead of the flashlight turning on. I don't know if they changed the geometry of the buttons or what, but I can't reliably use them anymore. There are other instances of low contrast text, weird blurry artifacts and janky animations.
I hope these are all things that get worked out during the beta period. Overall, the whole thing looks unimpressive so far. I keep telling myself that OSX had the same kind of jank during the first beta and it will all work out. I want to roll back to iOS 18, but I can't do that without using iTunes, which isn't possible because I only have Linux machines.
I use virtual box to run Windows under, precisely to have iTunes to sync my mp3 library to my phone. No streaming here my dudes, you’ll rip (pun intended) my mp3 collection from my cold dead hands.
God I gave up trying to use the camera from the lock screen because if you fail, it's slower than just unlocking it and using it from the main screen, which is itself pretty unreliably and slow. I wish there was a way to quickly and reliably take photos without constantly fighting the stupidly fragile UI. Back in the day, you could just press the shutter button on your camera and it would take a photo instantly, but somehow we've regressed and nobody cares. It eliminates a whole range of spontaneous photos.
Apple cares. The iPhone 16 introduces a hardware camera button. You can use to launch to Camera while the phone is locked. You can use it as a shutter button. And other stuff.
Except that it doesn't actually take a photo - it (slowly) launches the camera app, which you can then use to take a photo. You can long press to begin filming a video, but at least by default it won't actually take a photo to press the shutter. Poster above is correct, it's slow enough that I frequently miss spontaneous pictures on my iPhone 16 Pro - as much because of the terrible recessed design of the shutter button as the software delay.
As I read your reply, I couldn’t help but think of the number of spontaneous photos I’ve been able to capture over the last decade because a camera is now built into my phone and available wherever I am. I still carry my camera a lot of the time, and for those who keep missing photos that depend on an instant shutter perhaps that would be a good move— but it’s hard to see how the effort to integrate a camera into phones is acting as a limit instead of expanding one
Oh it's certainly great having a camera in your phone. But it feels artificially crippled by all this fiddly software and tapping and swiping and reacting to the many screens you have to navigate through to get there. Great to hear newer phones have a hardware camera button, even if it does just open the app, that's still a big step forward.
> Why would you want to “focus on the underlying content” here? Tab bars and toolbars still cover the underlying content, and the more transparent/translucent they are, the worse. When something fades to the background, it literally ceases to be in the foreground, so there’s no point in focusing on it. This is like proposing an interface that helps you focus your sight on your peripheral vision.
I believe that's exactly what Apple wants. This new design direction appears to be a strategy to unify all UI for VR as well.
If all controls are designed to be translucent, they (Apple) have freedom to put the control anywhere on the user's field of view on VR and allow "focus on the underlying content" (which in the case of VR, is the real world).
Time will tell if this approach makes sense for 2D screens.
UI unification strategies for different platforms seem to be very temping but usually make things worse. MS tried it with Windows 8 but it turns out that it made all platforms worse. Not a good tablet and worse desktop experience.
On the other hand, Apple optimized iOS for a phone without unifying with MacOS and was very successful.
The whole point of having different platforms in the first place is to cater to different needs, contexts, and user experiences. If they could be unified, they wouldn't be different platforms in the first place.
A big part of Vision pro is unifying other platforms into it, but I doubt the desktop streaming stuff is sending over a layered refractive index buffer and normals for it to be anything but worse in VR if it already made the desktop worse in 2d. You would almost need something more like an x11 client server approach.
I am not sure if I agree with the conclusion about the Windows 8 UI unification, I still believe it could have made sense. It's just that as is often the case with MS, they let a good idea go to waste by doing a half assed implementation, then backtracking...
The problem is that they bought into the iPad hype.
The correct way to build a tablet OS is to start with a desktop environment and optimize it - including third-party software - for fingers. We see this with iPadOS, which keeps getting hand-me-down features from macOS, implemented almost exactly the same as they are on macOS but with bigger tap targets.
In contrast, Windows 8 saw Microsoft taking the contemporary state of the iPad - single window, everything full screen, etc - and treating this as the future. Hell, I'm surprised they even shipped split-screen on it. They even locked down the app runtime to signed Store apps only[0]. My guess is that management saw dollar signs from how much Apple made from the iOS App Store and thought turning Windows into an "iPad Killer"[1] would replicate the same success.
Ironically, Windows 7 was already built to be a touch-friendly desktop, they just didn't actually finish making it touch-friendly.
[0] Which created a fun bifurcation between widget toolkits in the Microsoft ecosystem that persists to this day.
[1] Any time a company describes a product as a "killer" product, i.e. something intended to outcompete another product, they've already lost.
Strongly disagree. Windows 11 is EXACTLY what you describe and it's not a great tablet experience. IMO it's worse than 8, 8.1 or 10. I probably accidentally close a web browser about 5 times a day on my Surface from my palm brushing the X on the window controls while trying to enter something in the URL box or search bar or swapping tabs. Switching apps sucks. The gesture controls of 8/8.1 were really good and thought out for tablets (not desktops) and full screening apps made maximal use of space while making it hard to unintentionally quit something. Meanwhile on Windows 11 they have made gestures literally near useless and something I never want to trigger ever. Yeah, MS I want easy access to garbage tabloid news and some junk AI feature. Thanks.
What MS SHOULD have done is just left desktop Windows 8 be a lightly reskinned Windows 7 and only trigger the tablet UI in tablet mode on supported devices. But no, they had to make a bad mouse experience which soured everyone on 8's UI forcing them to backpedal.
Had the Surface RT launched at the same price with pen support I think it could have had serious legs as a device for students even with all the limitations. But no, another missed opportunity.
I remember when Windows 8 came out, I was curious how complex apps would work with the Metro interface. I thought MS would convert their own apps to it but that never happened.
Serious question, anyone have guesses on how such an awful set of UI changes could have gotten approved? Even amongst my non-tech friends, they all agree that based on screenshots, things are harder to read. The latest iOS 26 beta even makes the glass effect more opaque which to me is an admission they screwed up, but they also certainly can’t completely backtrack at this point.
Apple has consistently balanced beauty and function, from their hardware to stores to product packaging. They must have an army of experienced UX designers and well thought out user testing processes. Given all that, how in the world did this liquid glass idea even get past the preliminary mockup stage? Were/are they simply betting that the cool factor of the glass effect will outweigh the usability issues? And that Windows Vista’s glass UI went out of style simply because it wasn’t realistic enough?
They do, which means they have an army's worth of officers all trying to jockey for influence and power and position with little pet projects and "suggestions" and so on.
Apple's best years in UX were well before the army arrived, when they had a single man with great taste ultimately green-lighting every decision.
Apple's air of "design excellence" is stale, and is purely marketing now, i.e., a lie.
They probably want to move users away from the iphone and onto a new platform? probably AR glasses? There is a similar (kind of) conversation on how car design got worse so people will fall less in love with their cars and switch to electric.
Been test driving the iOS beta, and as a designer, I like it. In fact, I think it's great. You could tell beta 1 was early, beta 2 already fixes many of the issues.
The rounding on the corners bothers me more than anything else. It just doesn't look good on a mobile screen. There's already minimal space to play with, why make the target zone for a button even smaller? It adds to visual noise as well.
I believe that at this point Apple is less concerned about the mobile screen, with their existing userbase sufficiently locked-in the priority is probably a UI-language that works (and blends) well on large surfaces (AR-glasses)...
Which is strange given that VR and AR are niche at best. The smartphone took off at the time because it was affordable and unobtrusive, Apple's own AR device is just silly to use in public.
(I'm aware this is partly cultural desensitization, I remember the memes back when of people looking like shrimps staring at their phones etc).
It is less strange when you consider that AR could be the technology to replace the smartphone itself.
So far nothing could replace it (headsets, watches, other wearable) because while different ways of interaction exist, the users always needed a screen for (media) consumption.
An AR device could suddenly tick all boxes, make a user buy such glasses as companion device and slowly transition away from his iPhone. So Apple needs to prepare and expand its ecosystem stickyness to AR.
Apple rescued itself from bankruptcy with the iPod. When mobile phones began to gain storage for MP3s and internet access, Apple saw the writing on the wall for their cash cow. They pushed a multitouch acquisition from room-scale projection to another level for handheld devices, and then married that with its supply chain breakthroughs at the time. Now it sees the writing on the wall for iPhone and the relevancy of all the halo products and services once more ambient on-person computing becomes common.
I'm sorry, but no. Apple was a quite stable company in 2001 before the iPod. It was saved from bankruptcy with the iMac and the early Jobs era of Macs. The iPod helped rocket Apple to the stratosphere, but the company would have been fine without it.
That actually makes a ton of sense and I don't know why you are being downvoted! In AR there's much more space, so padding and rounded corners matter less, and in VR you don't want control surfaces obstructing the view completely. It's useful to be able to see there's "something" behind that navigation icon. Even if you can't distinguish it clearly at least you won't walk into it.
Not saying it's a good bet for Apple or for users, but it seems that's the bet they are making.
That's absolutely obvious. What people are arguing is that this is a terrible move for many reasons. 0.1% of iphone users have a Vision Pro and Apple just degraded the experience for all of us.
They do this because there might soon be a disruptive AR-product (e.g. some nextgen Meta RayBan's) which gets adopted as companion device by the iPhone userbase and then gradually shifts their usage away from the iPhone to that other product.
So Apple needs to expand their ecosystem with all its stickyness to AR, as this ensures that even if competing AR products will be more appealing, they will all be inferior because only Apple's AR-product will allow you to mirror your whole iOS experience with all apps and content.
Ok, preparing for another corporation's takeover of the AR market is indeed a much better strategy (for Apple). Still, is it worth worsening the experience for all your current customers? Apple simply doesn't care about them, just hoarding cattle.
Well...yes, they are cattle. And the cattle doesn't like when someone says that, but Apple's most lucrative asset is that it is gatekeeper to a group of consumers with above-average spending power. Most of what Apple did in the last years was to ensure that their customers cannot be reached without Apple being paid.
How many have used the new iOS daily since it was announced?
Gentle reminder that the average Mac user is nontechnical, especially the younger generation. IMO this is Apple slapping a formalized paint on the simplification of iOS 7, and doubling down on iconography (not app icons).
Now all of that said — there are major usability concerns in iOS 26 and the liquid glass design language. The file picker’s previous “Done” has been replaced with a single checkmark. Significant meaning is lost in a few places, and there are super-odd double-X icons (in mobile safari while entering a URL, for example). Safari’s new tab button is now out of reach, while the previous new tab gesture is now new tab group. Context menus expand now, instead of swipe, meaning what used to feel more natural now takes extra taps/muscle memory updates.
That all said, as iOS 7 improved over time and was nailed down, so will this.
To me it’s given the iPhone - an incredibly boring platform/device 18 years in - new life. The new Lock Screen Photo Shuffle is incredibly personable and downright beautiful. From my understanding, a lot of work went into pre-composing app icons, many of which are objectively beautiful.
I’ve found users can’t find buttons “under the thumb” so I’m curious how the dedicated tab bar search will work in practice.
Overall I think for the goals of liquid glass as a design system, it’s something only Apple could do - in a good way.
I did a yolo and installed it the day after it was released. I have been daily driving it since. I like it. And I mean I really like it. When Apple says the focus is the content, they really mean it. The content is king here, not the interface.
All of these things people keep telling me are "worse" are often things I thought were poorly designed in the first place. Being able to find controls easily seems to be the biggest complaint, for instance the buttons in Safari. I've always thought the buttons in Safari were unintuitive. This actually feels better to me.
This idea that things are harder to find because of the visual changes, that goes away in like a day. Just like every major visual upgrade before this your eyes train to it _extremely_ quickly.
I do feel like they "borrowed" the shape of textboxes from google though with the circular edges. I was never really a fan of that shape.
> while you won’t actually be able to see the part of the image under the sidebar, on the other hand the transparency effect applied to the sidebar will make the text on it less legible overall. A great lose-lose situation, visually, don’t you think?
Yes, of course, but it looks bold and innovative and designers can waste years tweaking various details across many apps!
> reduces the amount of information displayed on screen, and you’ll have to scroll more as a consequence. ... You’re just injecting white space everywhere.
Sure, but that's a common scourge in all modern design, why would an innovative design company stay behind?
> But it’s not just that, it’s that these ‘Icon Appearances’ also remove colour, depth, and personality from third-party app icons too. This further dictates (and interferes with) what kind of design a third-party developer may choose for their apps. All this after recommending employing “a minimal number of shapes” and “prefer[ring] a simple background”.
This is something Apple has been consistently great at. I do not want a 3rd Party App to look and feel massively different from a first party app. In fact I'd like all apps to look and feel very uniform. Whenever some third rate designer thinks their design is somehow better than the entire rest of the systems design you get ugly mismatches and clashing styles. Even if the 3rd Party Design IS superior, it won't look any good being completely out of place.
The main issue that I have with Liquid Glass, is that it changes a bunch of dimensions and behaviors.
If you are writing all your apps in SwiftUI, then that's probably OK. However, the vast majority of apps use UIKit (or use a library that is ultimately based on UIKit), with AutoLayout. In fact, I'll bet that most of the really big apps are still ObjC/NonAutoLayout.
AutoLayout/UIKit is a big fat pain in the ass, but it works extremely well. It has had over a decade, to buff out the rough spots and corner cases. I can't think of a single UI conundrum that I've had, in the last ten years, that I couldn't figure out how to address with AL. With SwiftUI, I'm constantly running into "You can't get there, from here."
Most (probably all, but I have a couple of old ones) of my apps work well in any display. That means resized (usually narrow vertical) iPad windows, rotated iPhones (where a lot of the UI scrolls off the bottom, and you need to scroll for it), and resized Mac windows.
With SwiftUI, you tend to get support for that pretty much automatically, but with AL, you usually need to specifically design for it, so when the phone gets rotated, things flow into the right places, etc.
Adding all the LG borders around things like tab bar items and navbar items, changes the layout; sometimes, fairly substantially.
Right now, I'm just tossing a UIDesignRequiresCompatibility into the Info.plist, but that feels like a kludge, and I'll need to adapt, but that may take a while.
Not mentioned is the peculiar response by the Apple ecosystem pundits. They were oddly supportive of these maladaptive design system changes on the basis of excitement (they can’t afford to be left out of the media momentum…). I believe their collusive tendencies mask what would otherwise be perceived as a major flop or severe error.
Also not mentioned in the piece, I remain curious as to the internal Apple team/culture changes that resulted in this design system failure. What on earth happened?
About the icons: Original book looked best: we have lots of pixels, why not use them? The icon has a non-standard shape, making it easy to spot.
Or if you actually need to have icon-shaped outlines, top-right one is beautiful, too. Although the shading should perhaps be removed if some OSs have their own shade logic for the whole images.
I have a feeling this will be yet another case of the nerds thinking something is a huge deal and when people update their phones this fall I bet most people won't care after 10 minutes.
Is that not every major software release? Like what are you gonna do, stop using your phone / laptop and turn hermit? Because I 100% feel people would be more likely to do that than to hop ecosystems, but then this is obviously not happening either. So yes, people will just shake their fist at the sky and then just slowly accept whatever instead. Not because "nurds stoopid", but because life moves on. Life's not anywhere near so narratively satisfying.
iOS starts shoving the update down your throat the moment it’s out. I wonder if there’s a “don’t try to auto update the OS dammit” setting somewhere. I guess I’ll be investigating this fall!
It will be harder to use for non-impaired people as well, though they might not consciously notice and/or still like how it looks despite being harder to use.
Then you turn on "Reduce Transparency" in the Accessibility options. And then it's all gone. Testing it right now in the beta and everything is opaque. Even the faux-glass elements.
You're assuming that more than a fraction of users will know that setting even exists. The majority of people with vision impairments aren't people who are used to thinking of themselves as disabled and know their way around an a11y menu; they're 60-something grandparents trying to navigate their iphone to see photos of the grandkids.
I don't like this theme. I don't like pushing people to use settings like "reduce transparency" because they also make the UI much uglier, even before this increase in the use of transparency-- non-default settings like this are an afterthought, design-wise. It means downgrading to a second-class experience.
However, I find this a bit irksome:
> The majority of people with vision impairments aren't people who are used to thinking of themselves as disabled and know their way around an a11y menu
That should change, and to the extent that something like this makes a small push in that direction, so much the better. Disability is a spectrum, everyone will deal with disability to some extent in their lifetime, and accessibility features are for everyone.
Separating out "serious" accessibility considerations from those of people with "normal" accessibility needs is just likely to make accessibility features even more second-class. If the main problem is the problem you describe, it should be fixed by better surfacing the existing accessibility features.
I will admit it takes a little getting used to. But that feeling goes away in literally a single day. Just like _every_ major OS upgrade before this, people complain that things are hard to find. But your brain gets used to these things so quickly.
I am really liking this upgrade. There is something appealing about seeing _less_ of the OS and more of your content. I know this felt like lip service, but the focus here really is content.
For example the lock screen. Before you even unlock your phone, your wallpaper is more visible than before. I've never enjoyed having my wallpaper cycle more than I do with update.
This is an update people are going to absolutely freaking fall in love with. It's good stuff.
Agree, it's great. And beta 1 => 2 fixed a ton of stuff. Plus there's a ton of room to keep improving from here for years to get to some really cool UI.
This reminds me about the time people would protest Facebook changes. What's more interesting is that Facebook is now dead and nobody cares about its UX anymore.
I have only been able to play with iOS 26 so far a little bit in the simulator, and so far it seems fine. To me it feels like after a couple months I will likely forget that a change was made (which TBH I think is a good thing, unlike when Windows has tried to make a change and never completes...).
However there is one thing that I wanted to comment on here:
> I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple. The guidelines and rules are meant to sublimate the brands of the third party, and replace it with Apple.
Personally one of the things that drives me insane is when an app tries to be special and have its own design language (looking at you Google) on my iOS device. The OS has an established design language and really should be used for most applications.
I understand wanting to have a brand identity but too many apps take this too far that just lead to a clunky experience.
Another data point here is how many people have Android setups or very complex iOS shortcuts that already do what Apple is trying to do with the tinting of third-party icons.
"Everything meshes with my chosen wallpaper" is a common aesthetic interest, that the article author dismisses because they don't care about it and mostly don't notice their own wallpaper, but if you look at certain subreddits and "Life Hacks" forums you'll find lots of people with heavily customized Android icon themes or deeply complex configuration of iOS shortcuts to aesthetically align everything they want on their home screen.
Sure, it's not earth shattering and the very definition of a nice-to-have that isn't hurting anyone in its absence, but it's also the sort of thing that enough people want to do the hard way that it seems nice to add an easy way to do it, too (and maybe more people will appreciate it than will take the hard way to it).
> The OS has an established design language and really should be used for most applications.
This is a valid point.
The other side of the story is that the iOS ecosystem is a marketplace where merchants offer goods and services, including Apple themselves.
Apple increasingly wants to decide how you present your brand, to the point that the only brand-language Apple allows on its devices is its own.
I think it's reasonable that merchants in this marketplace feel the increased pressure to work less on creating and refining their own identity and more on normalizing their offer like it could come directly from Apple, at their own expense and financial risk.
On a phone, it can be tempting for an app developer to approach design as if their app is temporarily taking over the phone and transforming the entire device into the custom gadget your app embodies, since the app's UI will be filling almost the entire screen. On a desktop, it's more obvious that an app should instead strive to coexist alongside (literally) other apps and the rest of the OS.
But in either case, ignoring the platform's established design language and UI conventions is still wrong, and not taking advantage of the user's preexisting knowledge about how to use their device is a wasted opportunity at best, insulting at worst. If the only reason for doing so is that you are placing your "brand identity" over actual usability and insist that your app look and feel the same on any device regardless of context, that's at the insulting hubris end of the spectrum. Given how widespread that problem is, it seems entirely appropriate and deserved for app developers to feel pressure from Apple (or any other OS vendor) to put more effort into conforming. We as users shouldn't want any app ecosystem to fragment into the mid-2000s WWW full of Flash UIs with zero accessibility.
> ignoring the platform's established design language and UI conventions is still wrong, and not taking advantage of the user's preexisting knowledge about how to use their device is a wasted opportunity at best, insulting at worst.
What valuable preexisting knowledge is ignored if you make your button text readable instead of being blurred with the glassy background?
Consider the simple case on a desktop OS of how to arrange the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons on a dialog box. For an experienced user of the platform, it doesn't actually matter at all how legible your button labels are, you're going to cause problems if they're in the wrong place. The platform conventions when used properly allow the user to entirely skip reading those button labels.
Obviously, if Apple's committed to taking their UI in the direction of illegibility again, then deviating from their new recommendations may be worthwhile. But the UI design should start by complying with platform conventions, and only break those to the smallest extent necessary, with good reason (which doesn't usually include anything about your app's brand identity). And hopefully, Apple can speed-run the kind of changes they did over the first several years of OS X as they toned down the initial excesses of the Aqua design.
> The platform conventions when used properly allow the user to entirely skip reading those button labels.
No it doesn't since you don't know whether the app is following that convention, so you need to read the label. Besides I don't think it's even possible to avoid reading a short label while looking at it.
> Consider ... how to arrange the "OK"
This isn't the topic, though, this is:
> Apple's committed to taking their UI in the direction of illegibility
> which doesn't usually include anything about your app's brand identity
Do you have a good example here as to me dentity in design is mostly about color theme and maybe a few shape tweaks, which has almost no usability impact?
Or that on Apple platforms, you are not supposed to use "OK" as a button, but rather the action it is going to perform (e.g. "Delete").
Using non-standard labelling _and_ putting buttons in their non-standard order is a real issue.
Not to mention that on some platforms the position of the buttons may be specific to localization, e.g. they may switch order if the user's language is set to Hebrew.
On Mac, the coloring indicates which action is triggered by default with the keyboard - one of the first things to go if you stylize the UI yourself.
These and all the other inconsistencies add up until you have something like the iOS Youtube app, where IMHO the UI is just complete nonsense. Just because you are full screen doesn't mean you can redefine fundamentals about how information is laid out or what taps are supposed to do.
I understand the rant, but disagree on the black/white framing of the topic.
A company like Netflix may have its own experience and expectation on UX for the service it offers, and it might be equally valid for them to want a consistent UX across all its devices carrying Netflix as it is for Apple to want it across all of Apples devices.
But here Apple attempts to define the UX for its devices AND the services offered there. This might be useful and even helpful for the ecosystem when the guidelines are reasonable and supportive of the ecosystem.
But when Apple suddenly defines "everything should be frosted glass!" and their design language no longer intends to "get out of the way" but "emphasize Apple above all", it becomes branding, creating a collision of interests...
If I'm using Excel or Spotify or just about any application, I would much rather it look the same across operating systems, than try to match each operating system.
I'm going to assume you don't want Excel to look the same on your desktop as on your phone. But even between Windows and macOS, I find it hard to believe you don't want at least a reasonable baseline of appropriate native behavior.
Are you primarily a Windows user and just want the app on macOS to look and feel like the Windows environment you're used to—essentially wishing there weren't different platforms to begin with, but otherwise dodging the issue? How would you feel if you encountered a macOS-style open/save dialog while working on Windows? Or if an application tried to attach its menus to the top of the screen instead of the top of each of its windows? Or if it responded to Ctrl-C by cancelling an operation instead of copying what you had selected? Or if the window close button was in the wrong corner?
You're just prejudging the answer. Who wouldn't want reasonable and appropriate? The issue is that a lot of these platform-specific defaults are bad unergonomic legacy
Case in point: "Or if the window close button was in the wrong corner?" That would be great to have on any platform since it's a common UI mistake to clump categorically different buttons (non-destructive minimize and destructive close) together, thus raising the cost of a misclick
That's the main issue with your argument - yes, familiarity is a UI benefit, but the net benefit of following a UI convention depends entirely on said convention.
I used to think like that because it's very much a core tenet of the mac/apple ideology (it's basically a form of narcissism at the level of a brand).
But the actual reality is that the OS does not matter that much. The application is actually what's useful and exactly why we are even using the computer in the first place. The OS is just a middle man that we can't really cut out but should make itself as transparent as possible.
It follows then that the UI should be designed around the needs of the application and that it should be translated/transposed/copied across platforms regardless of the primary look of the platform. And this is exactly the problem with Apple stuff, focusing too much on superficial aesthetics at the expense of more substantial usefulness.
For example, if Apple hadn't decided to completely re-skin their whole office suite to make it "mobile ready", maybe they could have worked on the actual feature set and performance (awful in both cases against the offering of Microsoft).
Ironically, when Apple ported iTunes to Windows, they did a perfect copy paste, going through the trouble of creating their own UI framework specifically for Windows. So, it seems that their requirement/demands only applies to others, never themselves.
I agree that there usually needs to be some level of OS consistency - using system file dialogs, keyboard shortcuts, etc. - but I don't think it extends to aesthetics.
Commenters seem confident that Liquid Glass is basically a VR thing. But I thought the Metaverse bombed, Apple Ski Googles (correct name?) bombed. Why would Apple go all-in on VR when it's looking more and more like VR is not coming for a while, if ever?
This is likely going to look really cool and feel even better on iOS and iPadOS. The phones haven't changed visually (hardware or software) a ton in a decade because, frankly, they are a really mature and solid product. There's a reason not many iPhone 15 users upgraded to 16. With Liquid Glass, for once in a long while iPhone users will look down and instantly see drastic change. Remember iOS 7? That took a long time to iron out all the "oof!" as well. But it slowly did improve.
On MacOS, though, I really do worry it's going to take several iterations before things make a lot of sense. God forbid this new UI layer hurts performance, too, on these exceptionally fast machines.
Good news is things are still in beta. Some ideas can always be walked back.
Organizationally, Apple have definitely stuffed the Mac. Catalyst was a mistake and with hindsight they should have just made SwiftUI more capable, earlier. But now they’re focusing on building Android apps with it too?! To say nothing of locker service etc.
it’s crazy. it seems like someone came up with this new design because they liked the transparency effect and only afterwards they came up with the arguments and reasoning about it. worse, if they would have the balls to say “we changed it because we believe it looks nicer and this is where we want to move with our uis” i would at least respect them because of it. but they cannot say something like this (prob because it’s not investor friendly), so they have to come up with these clearly conflicting reasons
Beside of the fact that App-Developers don't have the option to "stay on iOS18 or switch to Android", that statement is equivalent to "Stop criticizing my country. If you don't like what it is doing, find yourself another country".
Developers (and users) are citizens of that ecosystem, serving other citizens and contributing to its economy. It is their right to judge and criticize directions being taken.
The owner of that ecosystem must endure and acknowledge this (especially when he continuously makes efforts to increase the difficulty to LEAVE that ecosystem), and other citizens should not take any offense from this at all.
> The owner of that ecosystem must endure and acknowledge this
Do they need to acknowledge it? Ecosystems aren't countries, they're markets, and citizenship doesn't exist here in the same sense – only participation in the ecosystem. Maybe there's some EU chicanery that makes it illegal for American companies to ship a UI that's displeasing to European tastes, but if we pretend that Apple is strictly an American company, would they need to acknowledge this at all if it didn't affect sales?
> I'm not sure we have the same understanding of "acknowledge". Apple can acknowledge criticism and still decide not to act on it.
We do, but what I'm suggesting is that Apple might exercise a third choice, which would be ignoring the criticism and pretending it doesn't exist if they don't think it will affect their sales.
That argument is moot, because it's not a third option. Apple won't release iOS 26.1 rolling back any of this. Their path is set, they will tweak forward only.
Towards developers they will apply "acknowledge and ignore" as the communication strategy, towards users they will continue to express the usual confidence to know best what he needs, because that's what their users like and that's the only thing they can do now anyway.
In a grander scheme of things, Apple needs to prepare a transition of their locked-in userbase to AR, because there is a risk that AR replaces the smartphone and their users move away from Apple then. So they have to transfer the stickyness of iOS to AR before that happens, to have a ecosystem headstart against all competitors.
The actual interest of users and developers are secondary, they need to smoothly transfer them to a new world without alienating them too much. The only way is forward.
Agreed, I think we're saying the same thing. Apple's already made up their mind on it and they're going to ship it no matter what at this point. To admit that it's not the best design for non-AR devices, whether rightly or wrongly (I personally don't mind it), would be to admit that their overall strategy is flawed.
It's time we acknowledge that the purpose of most UI "progress" or "change" is sales.
An entity like Apple introduces UI "enhancement" to attract prospective users and persuade existing users that the functionality of the product is new, efficient, or otherwise "good."
UI is generally fashion and trend that seeks the "new" at great cost.
This is why there is a lack of internal consistency or rigor with respect to some UI direction: consistency, functionality, etc. are not the point.
I think "sales" is just one of the post-hoc rationalizations. The real purpose very often is simply to justify the money you spent on UI designers; there's a kind of sunk cost fallacy where spending resources exploring design changes leaves management feeling like they must ship some kind of design change, and the UI designers are strongly in favor of leaving their mark on the product and securing a big accomplishment on their resume.
The incentives simply aren't aligned to support a long-term strategy of not constantly messing with your UI.
And messing with the UI is the single most salient thing that makes regular people hate using computers, and do so only when it is required.
It doesn't matter what is their justification about making something "better".
The industry has reached saturation; there no longer exists any justification for making a UI somehow "better" to invite in more users. Changes ONLY create frustration and anger among existing users, which is essentially everyone at this point.
Changing the way a UI operates is like in an automobile swapping the position of the accelerator and braking pedals and moving the windshield wiper controls to the center console, heater controls to a steering-wheel stalk, and then claiming it is a "New Fresh User Interface!!". Of course people CAN adapt, but they will not like it. And automakers are already discovering how moving features from tactile knobs & buttons to a center touchscreen is hated and are going back to what people know and like.
It is past time for the software industry to get the message.
> The real purpose very often is simply to justify the money you spent on UI designers
It's backwards. It's for the UI designers to justify the money spent on them. They can't just sit there and do nothing. Designing is their job! It's the same with every position.
Do you dress with a hat and shirt like someone in the 50s?
I see many angry comments because it's a change without a practical reason, and it's meant to make things more "new" or "fresh" at the cost of CPU and GPU resources. That's a valid complaint since making old devices obsolete is a design choice.
However, it's good to see it from a humane perspective. Fashion trends change because they are associated with identity, novelty, status, self-expression, etc. Companies make fashion changes to appeal to those things. For example, nobody complains if Nike changes a model just for fashion; however, everybody uses the same phone every day, just as they do with a pair of shoes. For us, working on programming or software design, the phone is just a tool, but for most people, the phone is a form of self-expression (like using single or double quotes in code, or tabs vs spaces). And every few years, tech companies undergo a fashion refresh.
So, even if Apple fires all the visual designers and keeps the same design for many years, people will likely grow bored with their UIs, which will push them toward competitors offering more stylish options.
>Do you dress with a hat and shirt like someone in the 50s?
I don't want my OS to have bell-bottoms and afro one year, a mohawk and ripped jeans the next, and a raver neon top with tracksuits and glow sticks the next.
A basic tee and jeans haven't went out of style since Marlon Brando and James Dean. Or a good shirt and a jacket. Or, if that's your thing, a Perfecto/Bomber/Motorcycle leather jacket. Or a sundress for women.
> For example, nobody complains if Nike changes a model just for fashion;
That's because shoes are part of clothes fashion. And even so, if established, long available models are changed or removed altogether (e.g. Doc Martens 1460, Converse Chuck Taylors, Timberland classic boot, Levis 501, etc.), these companies would get an earful from customers too.
Besides my OS is not the place for fashion to begin with. Especially when it messes with utility. It can look stylish or even "lickable".
But it absolutely doesn't need to change for fashion's sake.
The problem is this mindset that constant UI churn chasing "fashion" could ever be purely superficial and harmless. You say people would grow bored with a UI that never changes, but on the other hand, people learn to use a UI that doesn't constantly change.
Changing UI layout obviously breaks muscle memory, but even just reskinning the same layout with a new color scheme that changes the relative visual prominence of different UI elements brings usability penalties. It's rare that any UI change is purely beneficial or has no effect on usability. Unless proven otherwise, any UI change should be assumed to impose some usability harm on existing users, and the potential usability benefits of the change need to be weighed against that harm.
Don't pretend that the downsides of messing with an existing UI aren't real.
> Don't pretend that the downsides of messing with an existing UI aren't real.
Wow, you are barking at the wrong tree.
In my comment, I didn't say that the UI style changes were good or bad for usability. The comment thread had two postures: either these design changes have a business reason, or they are there to justify the designer's salary.
I wanted to highlight a third plausible reason: people crave experiencing something new, which is why businesses reflect that. For example, I love the classic Mac OS B&W style, but if Apple maintains the same style from 1984 to the present, many people will perceive it as outdated. (In fact, I remember reading MacOS 9 reviews pre-Aqua, that many comments highlighted how MacOS looked legacy compared to Windows 95.)
I'm not defending poor style changes or implying that they don't affect usability.
You seem to be saying that chasing fashion could be a sufficient justification for UI churn, instead of acknowledging that it will only ever be a very weak factor at best in favor of redesign, and never enough on its own to overcome the usability downsides of changing an established UI. UI overhauls need a more substantial justification than mere fashion.
What I'm saying is that "mere fashion" is not something minor.
If you consider the model proposed by Donald Norman in Emotional Design, the experience occurs on three levels: visceral, behavioral, and reflective.
The behavioral level is crucial. I'm not minimizing its importance.
But all three levels contribute to the user experience.
Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft redesign their UI because they want to maintain the perception that their products are modern, which justifies their UI updates.
> UI overhauls need a more substantial justification than mere fashion.
In the evolution of most UIs, many of the UI changes were driven by "fashion".
Most differences in behavior between Windows 3.1 and Windows 11 could have been achieved using the same visual elements of Windows 3.1. For example, Windows 95 moved the "Close" button outside the window control menu to make it easier to click; however, the same change could have been made while keeping the style of Windows 3.1. The switch from the "Program Manager" to the "Start" menu and taskbar could have been implemented with the Windows 3.1 style, without modifying its behavior.
When Apple launched OSX, its core was based on NeXT Step, and the goal was to replace Mac OS 9. They could have chosen to keep the Mac OS 9 style (which they initially did in the beta versions) to avoid disrupting the experience for existing users. The shift to Aqua was a fashion statement, conveying not only that Apple was modern but also highlighting the integration of their hardware and software, as the Aqua style matched the design of the iMac at the time.
I agree with you that disrupting the behavior and usability is not good. Many "fashion" changes could be incremental, allowing users to choose whether to retain their old version. But, you like it or not, the "visceral" perception in the user experience plays an important role.
We are increasingly making everything digital, and it's leaving the older generations that cannot constantly adapt and relearn as their memory gets worse, in trouble.
> Do you dress with a hat and shirt like someone in the 50s?
I wish it were like that, then I could be merely unfashionable, without someone coming into my house at night and replacing the clothing I bought and am used to with whatever is in style next.
I agree! The problem is that in software users don't have to option of retaining the old UI while updating the rest of the product, so there's always a fuss when some people prefer the old UI but are unwillingly forced to use the new one.
It's a management failure. Either management is directly approving gratuitous UI redesigns, or they're making the mistake of giving designers unrestrained freedom to decide what UI changes ship.
Or they needed some kind of glossy faux-development to headline the marketing year when Apple AI tanked, and this was the best they could cobble together at relatively short notice.
Meanwhile I get regular connection issues on Facetime on my iPhone 15 Pro Max, even though bandwidth isn't a problem here.
I think this UI update is designed to distinguish native applications on iOS from non-native.
Folks aren't going to be able to simply pound out a bunch of new icons to make their non-apple toolkit apps look "native". There's far too much compositing and such going on here.
I doubt Google is going to rush out and try to mimic the L&F either.
This MAY give native iOS apps a leg up over web and other "portable" toolkit apps.
>It's time we acknowledge that the purpose of most UI "progress" or "change" is sales.
It's time we separate sales from UI progress.
If they want to "attract prospective users and persuade existing users that the functionality of the product is new, efficient, or otherwise "good." they can make substantial changes, of which there are numerous areas currently lacking.
Which is what they did in the first 10 or so years of OS X.
Does it drive sales though? Windows XP remained popular long after Vista was introduced. It was seen as stable and familiar. I guess the difference is that in the Apple ecosystem, you don't have much choice over which OS version you use. Apple tends to keep users on the latest version that the hardware supports.
looks like only 2 versions of Windows is supported. current is windows 11 and windows 10 support ends in October. of course, windows 10 was released in 2015 so comparing version support isnt a fair comparison.
I don't see that as a bad thing. Nominally superficial change can a nice way to have a fresh look at something you've stopped noticing. I can be enjoyable simply because its new.
> I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple. The guidelines and rules are meant to sublimate the brands of the third party, and replace it with Apple.
I have the same impression. Frankly I believe the whole purpose of "Liquid Glass" is to create an exaggerated version of the GUI Apple intends to use later-on in AR glasses, which is then toned back again in later releases to match the feasible implementation on the glasses.
The expected migration curve seems to be to force all applications now to become more bland and less distinguishable from the OS (and Apple services), so that at the end of the journey (in a future AR-product) Apple can #1 render those apps consistently without disrupting their UX and #2 present itself as the user-facing service provider for all the value created by those apps (with the app-developer being responsible for the integration and UX-compliance).
It's a dream-scenario. Need a ride-hailing service? Let "the Apple glasses" do it for you. Under the hood the apps are then hopefully so streamlined already that service-providers will compete to be the fulfilment entity for this task.
It is a direct response to developer feedback - that they only are going to make iPhone apps because redoing design to support even just iPad, let alone a watch, TV, Mac, and AR variant is work. Even Facebook hasn't found the resources to port the Instagram app to have a proper UX on iPad.
This started with the separation of iPad OS (and release of Catalyst, and SwiftUI 1.0) in 2019. iPad OS is effectively the mother platform - an iPad app can be adapted down to target iPhone, or to target macOS and visionOS (with both those platforms also supporting running iPadOS apps natively without modification). The L&F changes in 2020 to macOS (with release 11) were heavily about making iPadOS and macOS more visually similar.
It doesn't surprise me at all that a team at apple tasked to make a consistent HIG and L&F across all products is borrowing heavily from the most recent HIG/L&F they worked on (Vision OS).
> Under the hood the apps are then hopefully so streamlined already that service-providers will compete to be the fulfilment entity for this task.
Probably going to be against the hivemind on this one, but I for one welcome this. Public transport, taxis, flights, hotels, to a degree even restaurants are fungible. I want to get from A to B, I want to have a bed for a few nights in some other city, I want to get some specific food.
That's what I need. What I do not want is to waste time to get what I need with bullshit.
That's why I love the "evil B" of hospitality - I see all available hotels for my travel, the associated price and pictures. I select an offer (usually the cheapest one that still has decent reviews), I click on "book", I confirm my data, that's it. I don't need to wade through dozens of websites, enter my data a dozen times, and then finally enter payment data on yet another shady website that's probably gonna get hacked sooner or later.
I don't want to waste my time researching the phone number of the local taxi company, so taxi.de it is, I only select where I need to go and a few minutes later a taxi shows up, no need to call someone, spell out the street name I live in to someone barely understanding me on the phone because Germany's phone service is dogshit.
I don't care about which specific Chinese restaurant I want, so I go on Lieferando, and half an hour later a nice load of fried rice with greens shows up at my door. And every time I have to go to a specific place (say for an anniversary) I know exactly why I despise the old way - everyone does seat reservations differently, no integration with anything.
What still irks me is flight booking, because while Google and a fair few other resellers/brokers do at least compare available options of different fulfilment providers, the actual booking I have to do is still on each airline's different web page. And rail travel is similarly annoying once you try to leave Germany.
This is very valid, I also don't like to install an app for every service. And I don't think there's a "hivemind" on this at all.
But it's reasonable that the merchants offering in the marketplace of that ecosystem start to observe how their opportunity to become the next "evil B of X" are increasingly diminished, in favor of being the fulfilment entity for the "benevolent A".
I neither need an "evil B" nor a "benevolent A", and substituting one for the other is not a solution either...
I can’t help but read Apple’s guidelines and think they read something from the 90s or early 2000s and completely misinterpreted it. Quoting (and this theme is repeated over and over):
> Ensure that you clearly separate your content from navigation elements, like tab bars and sidebars, to establish a distinct functional layer above the content layer.
This makes perfect sense. Separate content and controls. In this variant, controls go on top, like a toolbar, and then there’s a horizontal division (maybe an actual line, maybe just blank space), then content.
Then I looked at the pictures again and did a double take. Apple doesn’t have a clear separation at all. And the controls are at the bottom, not the top.
The punchline, of course, is that Apple transposed the Y and Z axes! The functional layer isn’t toward the top of the screen — it’s toward the user! You are supposed to separate content and controls along X or Y so that content is next to controls but separated a bit but, for some reason, Apple is floating controls over content, in the Z axis. The separation is a plane, parallel to the screen, that you can’t see because the controls are in the way.
Apple, turn off your fancy shaders and go back to the drawing board. You have so many more pixels than any 90s designer, and yet you can fit almost no unobscured content on the screen. And your poor users can’t see the divisions between content and everything else because you built the technology to rotate the whole UI 90 degrees about the X axis!
The core issue is that Apple et al all have their UX/UI in-house, which means on the payroll, which means they have to produce something new to justify their continued employment. But instead of devs who always have some bugs to fix or some old cruft to refactor, these opportunities are rare for UX/UI, mostly because you'd also need to employ proper support teams that have a way of aggregating customer complaints or improvement ideas (and legal FUD surrounding the question of "copyright on suggestions" - LWT famously bans their employees from even reading r/LastWeekTonight to avoid getting held liable if they use an idea someone suggested there) and to derive improvement ideas from there.
> I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple
I got my first taste of computers on early 90's Macs and was enchanted. Within a year I discovered DOS, Windows - and freedom. I did tech support for both Mac and Windows computers for several years. It's always been abundantly clear that the Empire of Mac exists for its own glorification (and obscene profits) - customers, developers, partners - they are all in service of Apple. It's unfortunate that Apple does some things with unparalleled quality and maintains a loyal following, because the apple has always been rotten at its core.
This beautifully summed up a lot of what I've been thinking about Liquid Glass since I first saw it. A lot of it doesn't really make sense - in an effort to make usability clearer, they are designing everything to look the same and create more empty space for... vibes?
As the years have gone on, it feels like computers are slowly losing every ounce of personality they once had. Software should be delightful to use! Computers felt fun! I'm hoping we eventually get through this minimal/bland era of UI design and come back around to design with a little creativity.
It feels like Apple is trying to subtly introduce the concept of spatial UI for the future, where the norm will be to have controls and content on separate "layers" - but I don't think it should come at a cost of sacrificing the interfaces we already have.
I see the same sort of thing happening in housing, and I think it's because the nature of the thing has changed.
Houses used to be for families; they were often quirky or strange or emergent, with weird layouts or materials. They may have garish wallpapers or floor to ceiling wood panelling. But these touches were reflective of the personalities of the owners. They met the needs of the specific people who inhabited them.
Nowadays, as houses are more of a commodity, they must be generic. All flat white interiors, straight corners, no cornicing or archetraves or plasterwork or anything to give the home a unique character. Instead it must be a blank canvas such that any inhabitant can put his own things inside it to make it his.
Computers are the same; what was once a niche product for enthusiasts and businesses has now become an instrumental part of nearly every moment of nearly everyone's lives. Thus they also must be generic and same-y, with limited avenues for superficial customisation, so that they can be interchanged or upgraded without jarring the user against the new version or device.
Personally I prefer radical customisation and quirkiness. I find it charming. But it seems that those who are designing (or perhaps only selling) the things disagree with me.
Not that I have much of a bone in this fight - I already own a home and don’t plan to ever move (which makes this especially easy for me to say) but generic, identical housing is probably going to be essential moving forward. One of the reasons we haven’t found a way to make home construction faster is because every single project is about as unique as can be.
Not to mention, there are still billions of people needing housing, and with the climate situation we’re already in, building billions of unique homes will make the problem a LOT worse.
Again, I don’t really care much about the issue, but I just think it’s worthwhile to remind people that the American way of life (which developing nations aspire to) is absolutely untenable as far as all modern as currently-feasible technology is concerned. Maybe we could live with not being expressive just on the outside of our houses specifically?
The solution here is to build more higher-density housing options. Tokyo has very affordable real estate because dwellings are appropriately-sized for dense urban lifestyles and are nearly uniformly mixed-use buildings with retail space on ground floors and residence/office above. Combine this with lax zoning and you have a recipe for affordable housing.
Comparing this to my own city of Melbourne, Australia: high-density dwellings are generally constrained to innercity suburbs and are still seen as undesirable compared to free-standing homes or semi-detached houses. Councils restrict the development of new high-density or mixed-use buildings for what amounts to NIMBYism. Inadequate public transport in the growth areas of the Northern and Western suburbs increases dependence on roads and freeways.
There are options to support affordable living in cities that don't involve covering our farmland and wildlife reserves with uniform white plaster cubes.
I agree wholeheartedly with some of your premises. Melbourne zoning, public transport, uniform white plaster cubes. All need unconditional improvement and some of it is simple rule changing to allow better solutions.
I contend other aspects of your ideas are not bad but need some work.
> The solution here is to build more higher-density housing options.
and
> undesirable compared to free-standing homes or semi-detached houses.
Any good idea for housing won't please everyone. In this case, when you see anything about the rich and famous are they likely to live in "high density" the way developers think of it?
space is desirable. Space you control (rent vs own.. another can of worms.) even more so! High density housing may help - any bloody action at all would be nice - but it isn't what people desire.
As for "covering our farmland and wildlife reserves"... Australia is a huge country and comparatively tiny population as yet. There is a looooong way to go before a significant area of the country is covered. However I would argue that we don't try to have a continuously expanding population - which would also help with housing costs.
I have mixed feeling on "NIMBYism" too. On the one hand we need solutions for people. On the other hand, the general idea of "people chasing happiness" means they should be free to oppose actions too. You can characterise it as a class battle of the rich opposing solutions to homelessness but usually each such situation is not clear cut, usually being muddied by developer profiteering too.
To throw another idea in there.. why is it that all the infrastructure monies are being spent in our capital cities? We have a crap ton of towns in the countryside - many of which are dying or barely holding steady. Why can't they grow at similar % as Melbourne? Where are the jobs there? After COVID they got a shot in the arm but it wasn't sustained.
> In this case, when you see anything about the rich and famous are they likely to live in "high density" the way developers think of it?
There are an awful lot of exceptionally wealthy people living in buildings in Manhattan with hundreds of apartments. Their apartments themselves are larger than average, but given how much they cost per square foot there’s clearly a lot of demand to live in that environment.
I imagine so! I wasn't trying to say apartment living is ultimately undesirable. But when there is the money to do it, that apartment has more space.
Basically, money = space. In the city, you need more money. In the suburbs you need less. There also other concerns like commute and facilities but that varies person to person.
For many people, the tradeoff to live in the suburb is the right decision because the other factors don't matter so much and so to get more space for their $ they choose suburb.
Does that mean high density housing is bad? Absolutely not! If there are people that want to live in X space for Y money then go for it. But that applies to suburbs too. Once you involve money there are developers/builders and rent/own issues however my general take is that higher density building are impeded by rules and regulations more than a lack of demand. I have nothing to really back that up though.
> Tokyo has very affordable real estate because dwellings are appropriately-sized for dense urban lifestyles and are nearly uniformly mixed-use buildings with retail space on ground floors and residence/office above
I thought being early to the low-birth-rate party, culturally valuing new construction more than "old bones" or whatever (preventing sitting on real estate), and a low-growth economy over the last ~100 years were much more relevant contributing factors than the type of construction they've prioritized
Some of the similarities are because of the need to produce at cheapest options.
But much, much more are because people have too much an eye on resale value, and if your house is different from all the rest, you reduce your buyer pool.
It costs nearly nothing to make kitchen cabinet heights comfortable for the main user; almost nobody does this even on full custom builds.
Yeah we need those identical brutalist and easy to build concrete housing estates like on A Clockwork Orange. Or a cookie cutter surrealist hellscape like in Edward Scissor hands. Sounds lovely.
Wow you actually cannot conceive of something between these two extremes?
> so that they can be interchanged or upgraded without jarring the user against the new version or device
I suppose this is a big point. I used to spend hours... days really... setting up a new PC. Partly because it would take ages just to get everything off the various floppy disks and CD-ROMs and installed onto the HDD, but also because everything was quirky.
Nowadays I hew to the default install of Ubuntu (or Windows + WSL2) and replacing my device (or SSD) or upgrading the OS is basically a seemless experience. I have some .bashrc/git config/etc stuff I can grab quickly and then I'm basically good to go.
When we all occupy subcultures the macro culture becomes a shell. The least common denominator wins.
Remember when applications had themes? Now you have the choice of Light Mode or Dark Mode.
I agree, and I'm frustrated this is the new big update because it seems like liquid glass ate up most of the energy that might have gone to a real major feature. Not only is it just UI changes, it looks worse.
> It feels like Apple is trying to subtly introduce the concept of spatial UI for the future
Fascinating observation! Speculation of course, but I think you nailed it, and this really helps me understand why they've done this
I liked Liquid Glass when I first saw it. I don't especially like the whole flat look everyone has had going the past few years so I was really looking forward to a refresh.
I downloaded the beta and the more I use it the less I like it. The icons are blurry, washed out and look terrible overall. I have a difficult time using the buttons on the lock screen to activate the flashlight and camera. Most of the time, I push them and the lock screen customization screen comes up instead of the flashlight turning on. I don't know if they changed the geometry of the buttons or what, but I can't reliably use them anymore. There are other instances of low contrast text, weird blurry artifacts and janky animations.
I hope these are all things that get worked out during the beta period. Overall, the whole thing looks unimpressive so far. I keep telling myself that OSX had the same kind of jank during the first beta and it will all work out. I want to roll back to iOS 18, but I can't do that without using iTunes, which isn't possible because I only have Linux machines.
I use virtual box to run Windows under, precisely to have iTunes to sync my mp3 library to my phone. No streaming here my dudes, you’ll rip (pun intended) my mp3 collection from my cold dead hands.
> I want to roll back to iOS 18, but I can't do that without using iTunes, which isn't possible because I only have Linux machines.
I don't know about now, but about 20 years ago iTunes worked under Wine to connect with my iPod and perform backups.
This may work for you for restoring using Linux, but you'll want good backups:
https://github.com/libimobiledevice/idevicerestore
God I gave up trying to use the camera from the lock screen because if you fail, it's slower than just unlocking it and using it from the main screen, which is itself pretty unreliably and slow. I wish there was a way to quickly and reliably take photos without constantly fighting the stupidly fragile UI. Back in the day, you could just press the shutter button on your camera and it would take a photo instantly, but somehow we've regressed and nobody cares. It eliminates a whole range of spontaneous photos.
Apple cares. The iPhone 16 introduces a hardware camera button. You can use to launch to Camera while the phone is locked. You can use it as a shutter button. And other stuff.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-the-camera-contro...
Except that it doesn't actually take a photo - it (slowly) launches the camera app, which you can then use to take a photo. You can long press to begin filming a video, but at least by default it won't actually take a photo to press the shutter. Poster above is correct, it's slow enough that I frequently miss spontaneous pictures on my iPhone 16 Pro - as much because of the terrible recessed design of the shutter button as the software delay.
As I read your reply, I couldn’t help but think of the number of spontaneous photos I’ve been able to capture over the last decade because a camera is now built into my phone and available wherever I am. I still carry my camera a lot of the time, and for those who keep missing photos that depend on an instant shutter perhaps that would be a good move— but it’s hard to see how the effort to integrate a camera into phones is acting as a limit instead of expanding one
Oh it's certainly great having a camera in your phone. But it feels artificially crippled by all this fiddly software and tapping and swiping and reacting to the many screens you have to navigate through to get there. Great to hear newer phones have a hardware camera button, even if it does just open the app, that's still a big step forward.
A second click does. It's immensely useful because it's a physical shutter button.
I use the action button on the other side to immediately start recording a video from the lock screen via a shortcut.
> The iPhone 16 introduces a hardware camera button
Sony Xperias have had a shutter button since the Symbian days.
Typed from an Xperia 5III.
It's a really good idea™. It also has light tap and long press functions.
On the iPhone 16, there's also a customizable action button on the other side that can be mapped to all sorts of things.
> Why would you want to “focus on the underlying content” here? Tab bars and toolbars still cover the underlying content, and the more transparent/translucent they are, the worse. When something fades to the background, it literally ceases to be in the foreground, so there’s no point in focusing on it. This is like proposing an interface that helps you focus your sight on your peripheral vision.
I believe that's exactly what Apple wants. This new design direction appears to be a strategy to unify all UI for VR as well.
If all controls are designed to be translucent, they (Apple) have freedom to put the control anywhere on the user's field of view on VR and allow "focus on the underlying content" (which in the case of VR, is the real world).
Time will tell if this approach makes sense for 2D screens.
UI unification strategies for different platforms seem to be very temping but usually make things worse. MS tried it with Windows 8 but it turns out that it made all platforms worse. Not a good tablet and worse desktop experience.
On the other hand, Apple optimized iOS for a phone without unifying with MacOS and was very successful.
Optimizing phones for VR seems a really bad idea.
Of course it makes things worse.
The whole point of having different platforms in the first place is to cater to different needs, contexts, and user experiences. If they could be unified, they wouldn't be different platforms in the first place.
A big part of Vision pro is unifying other platforms into it, but I doubt the desktop streaming stuff is sending over a layered refractive index buffer and normals for it to be anything but worse in VR if it already made the desktop worse in 2d. You would almost need something more like an x11 client server approach.
I am not sure if I agree with the conclusion about the Windows 8 UI unification, I still believe it could have made sense. It's just that as is often the case with MS, they let a good idea go to waste by doing a half assed implementation, then backtracking...
The problem is that they bought into the iPad hype.
The correct way to build a tablet OS is to start with a desktop environment and optimize it - including third-party software - for fingers. We see this with iPadOS, which keeps getting hand-me-down features from macOS, implemented almost exactly the same as they are on macOS but with bigger tap targets.
In contrast, Windows 8 saw Microsoft taking the contemporary state of the iPad - single window, everything full screen, etc - and treating this as the future. Hell, I'm surprised they even shipped split-screen on it. They even locked down the app runtime to signed Store apps only[0]. My guess is that management saw dollar signs from how much Apple made from the iOS App Store and thought turning Windows into an "iPad Killer"[1] would replicate the same success.
Ironically, Windows 7 was already built to be a touch-friendly desktop, they just didn't actually finish making it touch-friendly.
[0] Which created a fun bifurcation between widget toolkits in the Microsoft ecosystem that persists to this day.
[1] Any time a company describes a product as a "killer" product, i.e. something intended to outcompete another product, they've already lost.
Strongly disagree. Windows 11 is EXACTLY what you describe and it's not a great tablet experience. IMO it's worse than 8, 8.1 or 10. I probably accidentally close a web browser about 5 times a day on my Surface from my palm brushing the X on the window controls while trying to enter something in the URL box or search bar or swapping tabs. Switching apps sucks. The gesture controls of 8/8.1 were really good and thought out for tablets (not desktops) and full screening apps made maximal use of space while making it hard to unintentionally quit something. Meanwhile on Windows 11 they have made gestures literally near useless and something I never want to trigger ever. Yeah, MS I want easy access to garbage tabloid news and some junk AI feature. Thanks.
What MS SHOULD have done is just left desktop Windows 8 be a lightly reskinned Windows 7 and only trigger the tablet UI in tablet mode on supported devices. But no, they had to make a bad mouse experience which soured everyone on 8's UI forcing them to backpedal.
Had the Surface RT launched at the same price with pen support I think it could have had serious legs as a device for students even with all the limitations. But no, another missed opportunity.
I remember when Windows 8 came out, I was curious how complex apps would work with the Metro interface. I thought MS would convert their own apps to it but that never happened.
Serious question, anyone have guesses on how such an awful set of UI changes could have gotten approved? Even amongst my non-tech friends, they all agree that based on screenshots, things are harder to read. The latest iOS 26 beta even makes the glass effect more opaque which to me is an admission they screwed up, but they also certainly can’t completely backtrack at this point.
Apple has consistently balanced beauty and function, from their hardware to stores to product packaging. They must have an army of experienced UX designers and well thought out user testing processes. Given all that, how in the world did this liquid glass idea even get past the preliminary mockup stage? Were/are they simply betting that the cool factor of the glass effect will outweigh the usability issues? And that Windows Vista’s glass UI went out of style simply because it wasn’t realistic enough?
> army of experienced UX designers
They do, which means they have an army's worth of officers all trying to jockey for influence and power and position with little pet projects and "suggestions" and so on.
Apple's best years in UX were well before the army arrived, when they had a single man with great taste ultimately green-lighting every decision.
Apple's air of "design excellence" is stale, and is purely marketing now, i.e., a lie.
> Apple's best years in UX were well before the army arrived
Couldn't agree more. Leopard, Snow Leopard, Windows Vista, and 7 were by far the best-designed OSs to date.
They probably want to move users away from the iphone and onto a new platform? probably AR glasses? There is a similar (kind of) conversation on how car design got worse so people will fall less in love with their cars and switch to electric.
This is complete nonsense. No one in charge of product planning - for consumer electronics or automobiles - thinks this way.
I think i meant electric and driverless
Been test driving the iOS beta, and as a designer, I like it. In fact, I think it's great. You could tell beta 1 was early, beta 2 already fixes many of the issues.
> Serious question, anyone have guesses on how such an awful set of UI changes could have gotten approved?
hiring became run by recruiters and HR. who filter for surface over substance.
The rounding on the corners bothers me more than anything else. It just doesn't look good on a mobile screen. There's already minimal space to play with, why make the target zone for a button even smaller? It adds to visual noise as well.
I believe that at this point Apple is less concerned about the mobile screen, with their existing userbase sufficiently locked-in the priority is probably a UI-language that works (and blends) well on large surfaces (AR-glasses)...
Which is strange given that VR and AR are niche at best. The smartphone took off at the time because it was affordable and unobtrusive, Apple's own AR device is just silly to use in public.
(I'm aware this is partly cultural desensitization, I remember the memes back when of people looking like shrimps staring at their phones etc).
It is less strange when you consider that AR could be the technology to replace the smartphone itself.
So far nothing could replace it (headsets, watches, other wearable) because while different ways of interaction exist, the users always needed a screen for (media) consumption.
An AR device could suddenly tick all boxes, make a user buy such glasses as companion device and slowly transition away from his iPhone. So Apple needs to prepare and expand its ecosystem stickyness to AR.
Apple rescued itself from bankruptcy with the iPod. When mobile phones began to gain storage for MP3s and internet access, Apple saw the writing on the wall for their cash cow. They pushed a multitouch acquisition from room-scale projection to another level for handheld devices, and then married that with its supply chain breakthroughs at the time. Now it sees the writing on the wall for iPhone and the relevancy of all the halo products and services once more ambient on-person computing becomes common.
I'm sorry, but no. Apple was a quite stable company in 2001 before the iPod. It was saved from bankruptcy with the iMac and the early Jobs era of Macs. The iPod helped rocket Apple to the stratosphere, but the company would have been fine without it.
Writing is on the wall for the iPhone? That couldn’t be further from the truth.
That actually makes a ton of sense and I don't know why you are being downvoted! In AR there's much more space, so padding and rounded corners matter less, and in VR you don't want control surfaces obstructing the view completely. It's useful to be able to see there's "something" behind that navigation icon. Even if you can't distinguish it clearly at least you won't walk into it.
Not saying it's a good bet for Apple or for users, but it seems that's the bet they are making.
> but it seems that's the bet they are making.
That's absolutely obvious. What people are arguing is that this is a terrible move for many reasons. 0.1% of iphone users have a Vision Pro and Apple just degraded the experience for all of us.
They don't do this for Vision Pro.
They do this because there might soon be a disruptive AR-product (e.g. some nextgen Meta RayBan's) which gets adopted as companion device by the iPhone userbase and then gradually shifts their usage away from the iPhone to that other product.
So Apple needs to expand their ecosystem with all its stickyness to AR, as this ensures that even if competing AR products will be more appealing, they will all be inferior because only Apple's AR-product will allow you to mirror your whole iOS experience with all apps and content.
Ok, preparing for another corporation's takeover of the AR market is indeed a much better strategy (for Apple). Still, is it worth worsening the experience for all your current customers? Apple simply doesn't care about them, just hoarding cattle.
Well...yes, they are cattle. And the cattle doesn't like when someone says that, but Apple's most lucrative asset is that it is gatekeeper to a group of consumers with above-average spending power. Most of what Apple did in the last years was to ensure that their customers cannot be reached without Apple being paid.
How many have used the new iOS daily since it was announced?
Gentle reminder that the average Mac user is nontechnical, especially the younger generation. IMO this is Apple slapping a formalized paint on the simplification of iOS 7, and doubling down on iconography (not app icons).
Now all of that said — there are major usability concerns in iOS 26 and the liquid glass design language. The file picker’s previous “Done” has been replaced with a single checkmark. Significant meaning is lost in a few places, and there are super-odd double-X icons (in mobile safari while entering a URL, for example). Safari’s new tab button is now out of reach, while the previous new tab gesture is now new tab group. Context menus expand now, instead of swipe, meaning what used to feel more natural now takes extra taps/muscle memory updates.
That all said, as iOS 7 improved over time and was nailed down, so will this.
To me it’s given the iPhone - an incredibly boring platform/device 18 years in - new life. The new Lock Screen Photo Shuffle is incredibly personable and downright beautiful. From my understanding, a lot of work went into pre-composing app icons, many of which are objectively beautiful.
I’ve found users can’t find buttons “under the thumb” so I’m curious how the dedicated tab bar search will work in practice.
Overall I think for the goals of liquid glass as a design system, it’s something only Apple could do - in a good way.
I did a yolo and installed it the day after it was released. I have been daily driving it since. I like it. And I mean I really like it. When Apple says the focus is the content, they really mean it. The content is king here, not the interface.
All of these things people keep telling me are "worse" are often things I thought were poorly designed in the first place. Being able to find controls easily seems to be the biggest complaint, for instance the buttons in Safari. I've always thought the buttons in Safari were unintuitive. This actually feels better to me.
This idea that things are harder to find because of the visual changes, that goes away in like a day. Just like every major visual upgrade before this your eyes train to it _extremely_ quickly.
I do feel like they "borrowed" the shape of textboxes from google though with the circular edges. I was never really a fan of that shape.
> while you won’t actually be able to see the part of the image under the sidebar, on the other hand the transparency effect applied to the sidebar will make the text on it less legible overall. A great lose-lose situation, visually, don’t you think?
Yes, of course, but it looks bold and innovative and designers can waste years tweaking various details across many apps!
> reduces the amount of information displayed on screen, and you’ll have to scroll more as a consequence. ... You’re just injecting white space everywhere.
Sure, but that's a common scourge in all modern design, why would an innovative design company stay behind?
Meanwhile the VLC icon sidesteps all of it by making zero symbolic sense but never changing.
Is there much about VLC that does change?
> But it’s not just that, it’s that these ‘Icon Appearances’ also remove colour, depth, and personality from third-party app icons too. This further dictates (and interferes with) what kind of design a third-party developer may choose for their apps. All this after recommending employing “a minimal number of shapes” and “prefer[ring] a simple background”.
This is something Apple has been consistently great at. I do not want a 3rd Party App to look and feel massively different from a first party app. In fact I'd like all apps to look and feel very uniform. Whenever some third rate designer thinks their design is somehow better than the entire rest of the systems design you get ugly mismatches and clashing styles. Even if the 3rd Party Design IS superior, it won't look any good being completely out of place.
The main issue that I have with Liquid Glass, is that it changes a bunch of dimensions and behaviors.
If you are writing all your apps in SwiftUI, then that's probably OK. However, the vast majority of apps use UIKit (or use a library that is ultimately based on UIKit), with AutoLayout. In fact, I'll bet that most of the really big apps are still ObjC/NonAutoLayout.
AutoLayout/UIKit is a big fat pain in the ass, but it works extremely well. It has had over a decade, to buff out the rough spots and corner cases. I can't think of a single UI conundrum that I've had, in the last ten years, that I couldn't figure out how to address with AL. With SwiftUI, I'm constantly running into "You can't get there, from here."
Most (probably all, but I have a couple of old ones) of my apps work well in any display. That means resized (usually narrow vertical) iPad windows, rotated iPhones (where a lot of the UI scrolls off the bottom, and you need to scroll for it), and resized Mac windows.
With SwiftUI, you tend to get support for that pretty much automatically, but with AL, you usually need to specifically design for it, so when the phone gets rotated, things flow into the right places, etc.
Adding all the LG borders around things like tab bar items and navbar items, changes the layout; sometimes, fairly substantially.
Right now, I'm just tossing a UIDesignRequiresCompatibility into the Info.plist, but that feels like a kludge, and I'll need to adapt, but that may take a while.
Excellent summary of critiques.
Not mentioned is the peculiar response by the Apple ecosystem pundits. They were oddly supportive of these maladaptive design system changes on the basis of excitement (they can’t afford to be left out of the media momentum…). I believe their collusive tendencies mask what would otherwise be perceived as a major flop or severe error.
Also not mentioned in the piece, I remain curious as to the internal Apple team/culture changes that resulted in this design system failure. What on earth happened?
About the icons: Original book looked best: we have lots of pixels, why not use them? The icon has a non-standard shape, making it easy to spot. Or if you actually need to have icon-shaped outlines, top-right one is beautiful, too. Although the shading should perhaps be removed if some OSs have their own shade logic for the whole images.
I have a feeling this will be yet another case of the nerds thinking something is a huge deal and when people update their phones this fall I bet most people won't care after 10 minutes.
Is that not every major software release? Like what are you gonna do, stop using your phone / laptop and turn hermit? Because I 100% feel people would be more likely to do that than to hop ecosystems, but then this is obviously not happening either. So yes, people will just shake their fist at the sky and then just slowly accept whatever instead. Not because "nurds stoopid", but because life moves on. Life's not anywhere near so narratively satisfying.
You can easily wait for a few years to update MacOS or iOS, so it's not a huge deal.
iOS starts shoving the update down your throat the moment it’s out. I wonder if there’s a “don’t try to auto update the OS dammit” setting somewhere. I guess I’ll be investigating this fall!
MacOS has the same annoying behaviour, but you can still close the notice and keep on keeping on.
But if you don’t use the newest macOS, you don’t get all security updates. ;(
You still get security updates for older versions, and you are fine without them anyway.
It is probably largely true, but for people with vision and memory impairments Liquid Glass will be harder to use.
It will be harder to use for non-impaired people as well, though they might not consciously notice and/or still like how it looks despite being harder to use.
That feeling goes away incredibly quickly. Like every major visual update before it, this is a non-event.
Then you turn on "Reduce Transparency" in the Accessibility options. And then it's all gone. Testing it right now in the beta and everything is opaque. Even the faux-glass elements.
You're assuming that more than a fraction of users will know that setting even exists. The majority of people with vision impairments aren't people who are used to thinking of themselves as disabled and know their way around an a11y menu; they're 60-something grandparents trying to navigate their iphone to see photos of the grandkids.
Good defaults are extremely important.
I don't like this theme. I don't like pushing people to use settings like "reduce transparency" because they also make the UI much uglier, even before this increase in the use of transparency-- non-default settings like this are an afterthought, design-wise. It means downgrading to a second-class experience.
However, I find this a bit irksome:
> The majority of people with vision impairments aren't people who are used to thinking of themselves as disabled and know their way around an a11y menu
That should change, and to the extent that something like this makes a small push in that direction, so much the better. Disability is a spectrum, everyone will deal with disability to some extent in their lifetime, and accessibility features are for everyone.
Separating out "serious" accessibility considerations from those of people with "normal" accessibility needs is just likely to make accessibility features even more second-class. If the main problem is the problem you describe, it should be fixed by better surfacing the existing accessibility features.
I will admit it takes a little getting used to. But that feeling goes away in literally a single day. Just like _every_ major OS upgrade before this, people complain that things are hard to find. But your brain gets used to these things so quickly.
I am really liking this upgrade. There is something appealing about seeing _less_ of the OS and more of your content. I know this felt like lip service, but the focus here really is content.
For example the lock screen. Before you even unlock your phone, your wallpaper is more visible than before. I've never enjoyed having my wallpaper cycle more than I do with update.
This is an update people are going to absolutely freaking fall in love with. It's good stuff.
Agree, it's great. And beta 1 => 2 fixed a ton of stuff. Plus there's a ton of room to keep improving from here for years to get to some really cool UI.
Two weeks in, I still don't know if the speaker phone button is toggled or not.
Nerds are the canary, not the mainstream user, in product development.
This reminds me about the time people would protest Facebook changes. What's more interesting is that Facebook is now dead and nobody cares about its UX anymore.
I hope that one day, Facebook will be used as an example of what not to do.
I'm reminded of a meme, from around when Facebook had its IPO:
"Why is Facebook going public?
They couldn't figure out their privacy settings either!"
[dead]
I have only been able to play with iOS 26 so far a little bit in the simulator, and so far it seems fine. To me it feels like after a couple months I will likely forget that a change was made (which TBH I think is a good thing, unlike when Windows has tried to make a change and never completes...).
However there is one thing that I wanted to comment on here:
> I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple. The guidelines and rules are meant to sublimate the brands of the third party, and replace it with Apple.
Personally one of the things that drives me insane is when an app tries to be special and have its own design language (looking at you Google) on my iOS device. The OS has an established design language and really should be used for most applications.
I understand wanting to have a brand identity but too many apps take this too far that just lead to a clunky experience.
Another data point here is how many people have Android setups or very complex iOS shortcuts that already do what Apple is trying to do with the tinting of third-party icons.
"Everything meshes with my chosen wallpaper" is a common aesthetic interest, that the article author dismisses because they don't care about it and mostly don't notice their own wallpaper, but if you look at certain subreddits and "Life Hacks" forums you'll find lots of people with heavily customized Android icon themes or deeply complex configuration of iOS shortcuts to aesthetically align everything they want on their home screen.
Sure, it's not earth shattering and the very definition of a nice-to-have that isn't hurting anyone in its absence, but it's also the sort of thing that enough people want to do the hard way that it seems nice to add an easy way to do it, too (and maybe more people will appreciate it than will take the hard way to it).
> The OS has an established design language and really should be used for most applications.
This is a valid point.
The other side of the story is that the iOS ecosystem is a marketplace where merchants offer goods and services, including Apple themselves.
Apple increasingly wants to decide how you present your brand, to the point that the only brand-language Apple allows on its devices is its own.
I think it's reasonable that merchants in this marketplace feel the increased pressure to work less on creating and refining their own identity and more on normalizing their offer like it could come directly from Apple, at their own expense and financial risk.
On a phone, it can be tempting for an app developer to approach design as if their app is temporarily taking over the phone and transforming the entire device into the custom gadget your app embodies, since the app's UI will be filling almost the entire screen. On a desktop, it's more obvious that an app should instead strive to coexist alongside (literally) other apps and the rest of the OS.
But in either case, ignoring the platform's established design language and UI conventions is still wrong, and not taking advantage of the user's preexisting knowledge about how to use their device is a wasted opportunity at best, insulting at worst. If the only reason for doing so is that you are placing your "brand identity" over actual usability and insist that your app look and feel the same on any device regardless of context, that's at the insulting hubris end of the spectrum. Given how widespread that problem is, it seems entirely appropriate and deserved for app developers to feel pressure from Apple (or any other OS vendor) to put more effort into conforming. We as users shouldn't want any app ecosystem to fragment into the mid-2000s WWW full of Flash UIs with zero accessibility.
> ignoring the platform's established design language and UI conventions is still wrong, and not taking advantage of the user's preexisting knowledge about how to use their device is a wasted opportunity at best, insulting at worst.
What valuable preexisting knowledge is ignored if you make your button text readable instead of being blurred with the glassy background?
Consider the simple case on a desktop OS of how to arrange the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons on a dialog box. For an experienced user of the platform, it doesn't actually matter at all how legible your button labels are, you're going to cause problems if they're in the wrong place. The platform conventions when used properly allow the user to entirely skip reading those button labels.
Obviously, if Apple's committed to taking their UI in the direction of illegibility again, then deviating from their new recommendations may be worthwhile. But the UI design should start by complying with platform conventions, and only break those to the smallest extent necessary, with good reason (which doesn't usually include anything about your app's brand identity). And hopefully, Apple can speed-run the kind of changes they did over the first several years of OS X as they toned down the initial excesses of the Aqua design.
> The platform conventions when used properly allow the user to entirely skip reading those button labels.
No it doesn't since you don't know whether the app is following that convention, so you need to read the label. Besides I don't think it's even possible to avoid reading a short label while looking at it.
> Consider ... how to arrange the "OK"
This isn't the topic, though, this is:
> Apple's committed to taking their UI in the direction of illegibility
> which doesn't usually include anything about your app's brand identity
Do you have a good example here as to me dentity in design is mostly about color theme and maybe a few shape tweaks, which has almost no usability impact?
Or that on Apple platforms, you are not supposed to use "OK" as a button, but rather the action it is going to perform (e.g. "Delete").
Using non-standard labelling _and_ putting buttons in their non-standard order is a real issue.
Not to mention that on some platforms the position of the buttons may be specific to localization, e.g. they may switch order if the user's language is set to Hebrew.
On Mac, the coloring indicates which action is triggered by default with the keyboard - one of the first things to go if you stylize the UI yourself.
These and all the other inconsistencies add up until you have something like the iOS Youtube app, where IMHO the UI is just complete nonsense. Just because you are full screen doesn't mean you can redefine fundamentals about how information is laid out or what taps are supposed to do.
I understand the rant, but disagree on the black/white framing of the topic.
A company like Netflix may have its own experience and expectation on UX for the service it offers, and it might be equally valid for them to want a consistent UX across all its devices carrying Netflix as it is for Apple to want it across all of Apples devices.
But here Apple attempts to define the UX for its devices AND the services offered there. This might be useful and even helpful for the ecosystem when the guidelines are reasonable and supportive of the ecosystem.
But when Apple suddenly defines "everything should be frosted glass!" and their design language no longer intends to "get out of the way" but "emphasize Apple above all", it becomes branding, creating a collision of interests...
If I'm using Excel or Spotify or just about any application, I would much rather it look the same across operating systems, than try to match each operating system.
I'm going to assume you don't want Excel to look the same on your desktop as on your phone. But even between Windows and macOS, I find it hard to believe you don't want at least a reasonable baseline of appropriate native behavior.
Are you primarily a Windows user and just want the app on macOS to look and feel like the Windows environment you're used to—essentially wishing there weren't different platforms to begin with, but otherwise dodging the issue? How would you feel if you encountered a macOS-style open/save dialog while working on Windows? Or if an application tried to attach its menus to the top of the screen instead of the top of each of its windows? Or if it responded to Ctrl-C by cancelling an operation instead of copying what you had selected? Or if the window close button was in the wrong corner?
> reasonable baseline of appropriate
You're just prejudging the answer. Who wouldn't want reasonable and appropriate? The issue is that a lot of these platform-specific defaults are bad unergonomic legacy
Case in point: "Or if the window close button was in the wrong corner?" That would be great to have on any platform since it's a common UI mistake to clump categorically different buttons (non-destructive minimize and destructive close) together, thus raising the cost of a misclick
That's the main issue with your argument - yes, familiarity is a UI benefit, but the net benefit of following a UI convention depends entirely on said convention.
I used to think like that because it's very much a core tenet of the mac/apple ideology (it's basically a form of narcissism at the level of a brand).
But the actual reality is that the OS does not matter that much. The application is actually what's useful and exactly why we are even using the computer in the first place. The OS is just a middle man that we can't really cut out but should make itself as transparent as possible.
It follows then that the UI should be designed around the needs of the application and that it should be translated/transposed/copied across platforms regardless of the primary look of the platform. And this is exactly the problem with Apple stuff, focusing too much on superficial aesthetics at the expense of more substantial usefulness.
For example, if Apple hadn't decided to completely re-skin their whole office suite to make it "mobile ready", maybe they could have worked on the actual feature set and performance (awful in both cases against the offering of Microsoft).
Ironically, when Apple ported iTunes to Windows, they did a perfect copy paste, going through the trouble of creating their own UI framework specifically for Windows. So, it seems that their requirement/demands only applies to others, never themselves.
I agree that there usually needs to be some level of OS consistency - using system file dialogs, keyboard shortcuts, etc. - but I don't think it extends to aesthetics.
Pretending that aesthetics can be completely separated from usability is wrong, and only benefits the overzealous designers who need to be restrained.
> The OS has an established design language and really should be used for most applications.
Not if it's a bad design language.
> just lead to a clunky experience.
So no different than following the bad defaults
First option I will be enabling immediately is "Reduce Transparency"
It doesn’t help as much as it used to. ;(
Tick “Increase contrast” as well?
Commenters seem confident that Liquid Glass is basically a VR thing. But I thought the Metaverse bombed, Apple Ski Googles (correct name?) bombed. Why would Apple go all-in on VR when it's looking more and more like VR is not coming for a while, if ever?
This is likely going to look really cool and feel even better on iOS and iPadOS. The phones haven't changed visually (hardware or software) a ton in a decade because, frankly, they are a really mature and solid product. There's a reason not many iPhone 15 users upgraded to 16. With Liquid Glass, for once in a long while iPhone users will look down and instantly see drastic change. Remember iOS 7? That took a long time to iron out all the "oof!" as well. But it slowly did improve.
On MacOS, though, I really do worry it's going to take several iterations before things make a lot of sense. God forbid this new UI layer hurts performance, too, on these exceptionally fast machines.
Good news is things are still in beta. Some ideas can always be walked back.
Organizationally, Apple have definitely stuffed the Mac. Catalyst was a mistake and with hindsight they should have just made SwiftUI more capable, earlier. But now they’re focusing on building Android apps with it too?! To say nothing of locker service etc.
it’s crazy. it seems like someone came up with this new design because they liked the transparency effect and only afterwards they came up with the arguments and reasoning about it. worse, if they would have the balls to say “we changed it because we believe it looks nicer and this is where we want to move with our uis” i would at least respect them because of it. but they cannot say something like this (prob because it’s not investor friendly), so they have to come up with these clearly conflicting reasons
It's what happens when your designers take their inspiration from the garbage on dribbble.
I’m not a professional designer, but I like Liquid Glass. If you don’t like it, stay on iOS 18 or switch to Android.
Aside from the criticism of icons, every complaint in the article just came across as nit-picks.
Beside of the fact that App-Developers don't have the option to "stay on iOS18 or switch to Android", that statement is equivalent to "Stop criticizing my country. If you don't like what it is doing, find yourself another country".
Developers (and users) are citizens of that ecosystem, serving other citizens and contributing to its economy. It is their right to judge and criticize directions being taken.
The owner of that ecosystem must endure and acknowledge this (especially when he continuously makes efforts to increase the difficulty to LEAVE that ecosystem), and other citizens should not take any offense from this at all.
> The owner of that ecosystem must endure and acknowledge this
Do they need to acknowledge it? Ecosystems aren't countries, they're markets, and citizenship doesn't exist here in the same sense – only participation in the ecosystem. Maybe there's some EU chicanery that makes it illegal for American companies to ship a UI that's displeasing to European tastes, but if we pretend that Apple is strictly an American company, would they need to acknowledge this at all if it didn't affect sales?
I'm not sure we have the same understanding of "acknowledge". Apple can acknowledge criticism and still decide not to act on it.
The rest of your comment I don't understand, sorry.
> I'm not sure we have the same understanding of "acknowledge". Apple can acknowledge criticism and still decide not to act on it.
We do, but what I'm suggesting is that Apple might exercise a third choice, which would be ignoring the criticism and pretending it doesn't exist if they don't think it will affect their sales.
That argument is moot, because it's not a third option. Apple won't release iOS 26.1 rolling back any of this. Their path is set, they will tweak forward only.
Towards developers they will apply "acknowledge and ignore" as the communication strategy, towards users they will continue to express the usual confidence to know best what he needs, because that's what their users like and that's the only thing they can do now anyway.
In a grander scheme of things, Apple needs to prepare a transition of their locked-in userbase to AR, because there is a risk that AR replaces the smartphone and their users move away from Apple then. So they have to transfer the stickyness of iOS to AR before that happens, to have a ecosystem headstart against all competitors.
The actual interest of users and developers are secondary, they need to smoothly transfer them to a new world without alienating them too much. The only way is forward.
Agreed, I think we're saying the same thing. Apple's already made up their mind on it and they're going to ship it no matter what at this point. To admit that it's not the best design for non-AR devices, whether rightly or wrongly (I personally don't mind it), would be to admit that their overall strategy is flawed.
But for some reason, discussions of parts pairing, side loading, and app store fees tends to steer towards the "use a different phone, bro" argument.
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It's time we acknowledge that the purpose of most UI "progress" or "change" is sales.
An entity like Apple introduces UI "enhancement" to attract prospective users and persuade existing users that the functionality of the product is new, efficient, or otherwise "good."
UI is generally fashion and trend that seeks the "new" at great cost.
This is why there is a lack of internal consistency or rigor with respect to some UI direction: consistency, functionality, etc. are not the point.
I think "sales" is just one of the post-hoc rationalizations. The real purpose very often is simply to justify the money you spent on UI designers; there's a kind of sunk cost fallacy where spending resources exploring design changes leaves management feeling like they must ship some kind of design change, and the UI designers are strongly in favor of leaving their mark on the product and securing a big accomplishment on their resume.
The incentives simply aren't aligned to support a long-term strategy of not constantly messing with your UI.
And messing with the UI is the single most salient thing that makes regular people hate using computers, and do so only when it is required.
It doesn't matter what is their justification about making something "better".
The industry has reached saturation; there no longer exists any justification for making a UI somehow "better" to invite in more users. Changes ONLY create frustration and anger among existing users, which is essentially everyone at this point.
Changing the way a UI operates is like in an automobile swapping the position of the accelerator and braking pedals and moving the windshield wiper controls to the center console, heater controls to a steering-wheel stalk, and then claiming it is a "New Fresh User Interface!!". Of course people CAN adapt, but they will not like it. And automakers are already discovering how moving features from tactile knobs & buttons to a center touchscreen is hated and are going back to what people know and like.
It is past time for the software industry to get the message.
> The real purpose very often is simply to justify the money you spent on UI designers
It's backwards. It's for the UI designers to justify the money spent on them. They can't just sit there and do nothing. Designing is their job! It's the same with every position.
Do you dress with a hat and shirt like someone in the 50s?
I see many angry comments because it's a change without a practical reason, and it's meant to make things more "new" or "fresh" at the cost of CPU and GPU resources. That's a valid complaint since making old devices obsolete is a design choice.
However, it's good to see it from a humane perspective. Fashion trends change because they are associated with identity, novelty, status, self-expression, etc. Companies make fashion changes to appeal to those things. For example, nobody complains if Nike changes a model just for fashion; however, everybody uses the same phone every day, just as they do with a pair of shoes. For us, working on programming or software design, the phone is just a tool, but for most people, the phone is a form of self-expression (like using single or double quotes in code, or tabs vs spaces). And every few years, tech companies undergo a fashion refresh.
So, even if Apple fires all the visual designers and keeps the same design for many years, people will likely grow bored with their UIs, which will push them toward competitors offering more stylish options.
>Do you dress with a hat and shirt like someone in the 50s?
I don't want my OS to have bell-bottoms and afro one year, a mohawk and ripped jeans the next, and a raver neon top with tracksuits and glow sticks the next.
A basic tee and jeans haven't went out of style since Marlon Brando and James Dean. Or a good shirt and a jacket. Or, if that's your thing, a Perfecto/Bomber/Motorcycle leather jacket. Or a sundress for women.
> For example, nobody complains if Nike changes a model just for fashion;
That's because shoes are part of clothes fashion. And even so, if established, long available models are changed or removed altogether (e.g. Doc Martens 1460, Converse Chuck Taylors, Timberland classic boot, Levis 501, etc.), these companies would get an earful from customers too.
Besides my OS is not the place for fashion to begin with. Especially when it messes with utility. It can look stylish or even "lickable".
But it absolutely doesn't need to change for fashion's sake.
The problem is this mindset that constant UI churn chasing "fashion" could ever be purely superficial and harmless. You say people would grow bored with a UI that never changes, but on the other hand, people learn to use a UI that doesn't constantly change.
Changing UI layout obviously breaks muscle memory, but even just reskinning the same layout with a new color scheme that changes the relative visual prominence of different UI elements brings usability penalties. It's rare that any UI change is purely beneficial or has no effect on usability. Unless proven otherwise, any UI change should be assumed to impose some usability harm on existing users, and the potential usability benefits of the change need to be weighed against that harm.
Don't pretend that the downsides of messing with an existing UI aren't real.
> Don't pretend that the downsides of messing with an existing UI aren't real.
Wow, you are barking at the wrong tree.
In my comment, I didn't say that the UI style changes were good or bad for usability. The comment thread had two postures: either these design changes have a business reason, or they are there to justify the designer's salary.
I wanted to highlight a third plausible reason: people crave experiencing something new, which is why businesses reflect that. For example, I love the classic Mac OS B&W style, but if Apple maintains the same style from 1984 to the present, many people will perceive it as outdated. (In fact, I remember reading MacOS 9 reviews pre-Aqua, that many comments highlighted how MacOS looked legacy compared to Windows 95.)
I'm not defending poor style changes or implying that they don't affect usability.
You seem to be saying that chasing fashion could be a sufficient justification for UI churn, instead of acknowledging that it will only ever be a very weak factor at best in favor of redesign, and never enough on its own to overcome the usability downsides of changing an established UI. UI overhauls need a more substantial justification than mere fashion.
What I'm saying is that "mere fashion" is not something minor.
If you consider the model proposed by Donald Norman in Emotional Design, the experience occurs on three levels: visceral, behavioral, and reflective.
The behavioral level is crucial. I'm not minimizing its importance. But all three levels contribute to the user experience.
Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft redesign their UI because they want to maintain the perception that their products are modern, which justifies their UI updates.
> UI overhauls need a more substantial justification than mere fashion.
In the evolution of most UIs, many of the UI changes were driven by "fashion".
Most differences in behavior between Windows 3.1 and Windows 11 could have been achieved using the same visual elements of Windows 3.1. For example, Windows 95 moved the "Close" button outside the window control menu to make it easier to click; however, the same change could have been made while keeping the style of Windows 3.1. The switch from the "Program Manager" to the "Start" menu and taskbar could have been implemented with the Windows 3.1 style, without modifying its behavior.
When Apple launched OSX, its core was based on NeXT Step, and the goal was to replace Mac OS 9. They could have chosen to keep the Mac OS 9 style (which they initially did in the beta versions) to avoid disrupting the experience for existing users. The shift to Aqua was a fashion statement, conveying not only that Apple was modern but also highlighting the integration of their hardware and software, as the Aqua style matched the design of the iMac at the time.
I agree with you that disrupting the behavior and usability is not good. Many "fashion" changes could be incremental, allowing users to choose whether to retain their old version. But, you like it or not, the "visceral" perception in the user experience plays an important role.
The downsides are enormous for older people.
We are increasingly making everything digital, and it's leaving the older generations that cannot constantly adapt and relearn as their memory gets worse, in trouble.
> Do you dress with a hat and shirt like someone in the 50s?
I wish it were like that, then I could be merely unfashionable, without someone coming into my house at night and replacing the clothing I bought and am used to with whatever is in style next.
I agree! The problem is that in software users don't have to option of retaining the old UI while updating the rest of the product, so there's always a fuss when some people prefer the old UI but are unwillingly forced to use the new one.
It's a management failure. Either management is directly approving gratuitous UI redesigns, or they're making the mistake of giving designers unrestrained freedom to decide what UI changes ship.
Or they needed some kind of glossy faux-development to headline the marketing year when Apple AI tanked, and this was the best they could cobble together at relatively short notice.
Meanwhile I get regular connection issues on Facetime on my iPhone 15 Pro Max, even though bandwidth isn't a problem here.
> It's time we acknowledge that the purpose of most UI "progress" or "change" is sales.
It's such a stupid argument. Also wrong, because the purpose for everything that company does is profit.
I think this UI update is designed to distinguish native applications on iOS from non-native.
Folks aren't going to be able to simply pound out a bunch of new icons to make their non-apple toolkit apps look "native". There's far too much compositing and such going on here.
I doubt Google is going to rush out and try to mimic the L&F either.
This MAY give native iOS apps a leg up over web and other "portable" toolkit apps.
Yes, I believe this is the reason. But it might backfire if people start to prefer Electron or Flutter apps over the native ones.
>It's time we acknowledge that the purpose of most UI "progress" or "change" is sales.
It's time we separate sales from UI progress.
If they want to "attract prospective users and persuade existing users that the functionality of the product is new, efficient, or otherwise "good." they can make substantial changes, of which there are numerous areas currently lacking.
Which is what they did in the first 10 or so years of OS X.
Does it drive sales though? Windows XP remained popular long after Vista was introduced. It was seen as stable and familiar. I guess the difference is that in the Apple ecosystem, you don't have much choice over which OS version you use. Apple tends to keep users on the latest version that the hardware supports.
Looks like the currently 3 versions of mac OS are supported. current is macos 15, macos 13-14 are supported.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_os#Timeline_of_releases
macos 13 supports hardware back to 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_Ventura#Supported_hardwa...
looks like only 2 versions of Windows is supported. current is windows 11 and windows 10 support ends in October. of course, windows 10 was released in 2015 so comparing version support isnt a fair comparison.
People stuck with XP because Vista was slow and buggy.
This doesn't explain much since there is no sound proof that worse design improves sales but real progress /change/enhancements wouldn't
> … the purpose of most UI "progress" or "change" is sales.
If only! I wouldn't install macOS or iOS with that GUI if they payed me for it.
Pity those of us with commercial Mac apps.
I do. My condolences.
UI change is similar to fashion. Things can't remain stagnant, they must change.
I don't see that as a bad thing. Nominally superficial change can a nice way to have a fresh look at something you've stopped noticing. I can be enjoyable simply because its new.
Yeah I agree. I think it's the same way as fashion - it's often not new styles, just new takes on the past. But it keeps things fresh and interesting.
> I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple. The guidelines and rules are meant to sublimate the brands of the third party, and replace it with Apple.
I have the same impression. Frankly I believe the whole purpose of "Liquid Glass" is to create an exaggerated version of the GUI Apple intends to use later-on in AR glasses, which is then toned back again in later releases to match the feasible implementation on the glasses.
The expected migration curve seems to be to force all applications now to become more bland and less distinguishable from the OS (and Apple services), so that at the end of the journey (in a future AR-product) Apple can #1 render those apps consistently without disrupting their UX and #2 present itself as the user-facing service provider for all the value created by those apps (with the app-developer being responsible for the integration and UX-compliance).
It's a dream-scenario. Need a ride-hailing service? Let "the Apple glasses" do it for you. Under the hood the apps are then hopefully so streamlined already that service-providers will compete to be the fulfilment entity for this task.
It is a direct response to developer feedback - that they only are going to make iPhone apps because redoing design to support even just iPad, let alone a watch, TV, Mac, and AR variant is work. Even Facebook hasn't found the resources to port the Instagram app to have a proper UX on iPad.
This started with the separation of iPad OS (and release of Catalyst, and SwiftUI 1.0) in 2019. iPad OS is effectively the mother platform - an iPad app can be adapted down to target iPhone, or to target macOS and visionOS (with both those platforms also supporting running iPadOS apps natively without modification). The L&F changes in 2020 to macOS (with release 11) were heavily about making iPadOS and macOS more visually similar.
It doesn't surprise me at all that a team at apple tasked to make a consistent HIG and L&F across all products is borrowing heavily from the most recent HIG/L&F they worked on (Vision OS).
> Under the hood the apps are then hopefully so streamlined already that service-providers will compete to be the fulfilment entity for this task.
Probably going to be against the hivemind on this one, but I for one welcome this. Public transport, taxis, flights, hotels, to a degree even restaurants are fungible. I want to get from A to B, I want to have a bed for a few nights in some other city, I want to get some specific food.
That's what I need. What I do not want is to waste time to get what I need with bullshit.
That's why I love the "evil B" of hospitality - I see all available hotels for my travel, the associated price and pictures. I select an offer (usually the cheapest one that still has decent reviews), I click on "book", I confirm my data, that's it. I don't need to wade through dozens of websites, enter my data a dozen times, and then finally enter payment data on yet another shady website that's probably gonna get hacked sooner or later.
I don't want to waste my time researching the phone number of the local taxi company, so taxi.de it is, I only select where I need to go and a few minutes later a taxi shows up, no need to call someone, spell out the street name I live in to someone barely understanding me on the phone because Germany's phone service is dogshit.
I don't care about which specific Chinese restaurant I want, so I go on Lieferando, and half an hour later a nice load of fried rice with greens shows up at my door. And every time I have to go to a specific place (say for an anniversary) I know exactly why I despise the old way - everyone does seat reservations differently, no integration with anything.
What still irks me is flight booking, because while Google and a fair few other resellers/brokers do at least compare available options of different fulfilment providers, the actual booking I have to do is still on each airline's different web page. And rail travel is similarly annoying once you try to leave Germany.
This is very valid, I also don't like to install an app for every service. And I don't think there's a "hivemind" on this at all.
But it's reasonable that the merchants offering in the marketplace of that ecosystem start to observe how their opportunity to become the next "evil B of X" are increasingly diminished, in favor of being the fulfilment entity for the "benevolent A".
I neither need an "evil B" nor a "benevolent A", and substituting one for the other is not a solution either...
I can’t help but read Apple’s guidelines and think they read something from the 90s or early 2000s and completely misinterpreted it. Quoting (and this theme is repeated over and over):
> Ensure that you clearly separate your content from navigation elements, like tab bars and sidebars, to establish a distinct functional layer above the content layer.
This makes perfect sense. Separate content and controls. In this variant, controls go on top, like a toolbar, and then there’s a horizontal division (maybe an actual line, maybe just blank space), then content.
Then I looked at the pictures again and did a double take. Apple doesn’t have a clear separation at all. And the controls are at the bottom, not the top.
The punchline, of course, is that Apple transposed the Y and Z axes! The functional layer isn’t toward the top of the screen — it’s toward the user! You are supposed to separate content and controls along X or Y so that content is next to controls but separated a bit but, for some reason, Apple is floating controls over content, in the Z axis. The separation is a plane, parallel to the screen, that you can’t see because the controls are in the way.
Apple, turn off your fancy shaders and go back to the drawing board. You have so many more pixels than any 90s designer, and yet you can fit almost no unobscured content on the screen. And your poor users can’t see the divisions between content and everything else because you built the technology to rotate the whole UI 90 degrees about the X axis!
Almost hilarous:
> Apple Design-Guide: "Ensure that you clearly separate your content from navigation elements [..]"
Honest auto-complete:
"[..] the OS will then use the GPU to draw all attention away from the content to the navigation elements"
More like "liquid ass", please forgive the pun.
The core issue is that Apple et al all have their UX/UI in-house, which means on the payroll, which means they have to produce something new to justify their continued employment. But instead of devs who always have some bugs to fix or some old cruft to refactor, these opportunities are rare for UX/UI, mostly because you'd also need to employ proper support teams that have a way of aggregating customer complaints or improvement ideas (and legal FUD surrounding the question of "copyright on suggestions" - LWT famously bans their employees from even reading r/LastWeekTonight to avoid getting held liable if they use an idea someone suggested there) and to derive improvement ideas from there.
It's either "boom (every 3-4 years) or bust".
Same sht over and over again.
Apple keeps good or great things as their are: Apple is loosing its edge look how other are so innovative.
Apple takes some risk and go bold on things: Why changing things?
At the end everyone else complaining would just follow and copy.
Rinse and repeat, bring the eyeballs and the money to my btching site or profile.
> I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple
I got my first taste of computers on early 90's Macs and was enchanted. Within a year I discovered DOS, Windows - and freedom. I did tech support for both Mac and Windows computers for several years. It's always been abundantly clear that the Empire of Mac exists for its own glorification (and obscene profits) - customers, developers, partners - they are all in service of Apple. It's unfortunate that Apple does some things with unparalleled quality and maintains a loyal following, because the apple has always been rotten at its core.