The launch of iOS 26 was heralded as a “Spatial Awakening.” Apple’s design crew, led by the high-concept imaginative and prescient of Alan Dye, promised to bridge the hole between our bodily actuality and our digital instruments by means of a language known as Liquid Glass.

It was marketed as an interface that breathes—a hyper-dynamic, translucent, and motion-heavy UI that used real-time refraction to make your apps seem like they had been floating in a bodily pane of crystal.

However six months into the lifecycle of iOS 26, the decision is in from energy customers, builders, and accessibility advocates alike: Liquid Glass is a usability disaster. 

It’s the most smug piece of software program Apple has ever shipped—a system that calls for you admire its magnificence whereas it actively hinders your capability to make use of your cellphone. It’s a home of mirrors constructed on the bones of a once-efficient working system, and its failure has pressured probably the most radical management shakeup in Cupertino because the departure of Jony Ive.

The Loss of life of Legibility: A Low-Imaginative and prescient Nightmare

Probably the most elementary job of a person interface is to be readable. Liquid Glass fails this at a degree that will get a first-year design pupil expelled. By prioritizing “refractive realism,” Apple changed strong containers with semi-transparent, light-bending “panes.”

The issue is that the true world is messy. When your notification middle is refracting a high-detail picture of a forest or a vibrant sundown, the textual content “loses the struggle” to your consideration. This has created a Distinction Disaster.

Apple’s AI tries to dynamically shift textual content coloration based mostly on the background, however it incessantly fails on busy pictures, resulting in a “muddy” impact the place textual content turns into functionally invisible.

For customers with visible impairments—and even simply drained eyes—the fixed shifting of translucent layers creates a barrier to entry. We are actually in an period the place “Scale back Transparency” isn’t simply an accessibility possibility; it’s a necessary setting for anybody who desires to learn their messages in direct daylight.

The Efficiency Penalty: GPU-Pushed Ego

Liquid Glass treats the iPhone UI like a AAA online game. Each time you swipe, the system calculates real-time ray-traced reflections and “chromatic aberration” on the perimeters of your app icons. It’s a staggering waste of compute energy that has launched a degree of friction we haven’t seen in years.

Even on the powerhouse iPhone 17 Professional, the interface suffers from “micro-stutters.” The second the GPU throttles because of warmth or background duties, the “liquid” phantasm breaks, leaving the person with a laggy, disconnected expertise.

Moreover, the Battery Tax has been devastating. Knowledge suggests a ten–15% discount in real-world screen-on time as a result of the cellphone is successfully working a physics engine simply to indicate you your calendar. We’re utilizing 3-nanometer chips—miracles of human engineering—to render “shimmers” on icons that had been completely useful as flat squares.

The Uncanny Valley of Physics

In 2013, iOS 7 killed skeuomorphism as a result of we not wanted digital objects to seem like leather-based or felt. Liquid Glass is a return to a unique type of realism—Digital Skeuomorphism. Apple tried to make us imagine we’re touching floating panes of glass, however when the physics don’t match the tactile actuality, it falls into an uncanny valley.

The “wobbly” sliders and “floaty” icons lack the burden and intent that made the unique iPhone really feel like a precision instrument. While you transfer a slider within the Management Heart and it stretches like digital gelatin, it feels flimsy and unserious.

It’s “Barbie-fied” tech—shiny, plastic, and essentially performative. As critic John Gruber famous, Apple spent billions making the thinnest {hardware} on the planet solely to place a UI on it that appears like a Home windows Vista fever dream.

The Alan Dye Departure and the Inside Revolt

The departure of Alan Dye to Meta in late 2025 was the final word affirmation that the “Liquid” experiment had reached its lifeless finish.

Studies from inside Apple Park recommend that Dye’s crew incessantly brushed apart warnings from accessibility and efficiency engineers to take care of the “purity” of the aesthetic.

When Dye left, he left behind a UI that appeared gorgeous in a 4K keynote presentation however felt “stressed and needy” within the arms of an actual particular person. The truth that Apple needed to rush out iOS 26.2 with an “Opaque Mode” was a silent admission of failure.

Apple doesn’t add “undo” sliders to its core imaginative and prescient except that imaginative and prescient is actively breaking the person expertise.

The Rescue Mission: Stephen Lemay and “Strong Design”

The keys to the iPhone’s soul have now been handed to Stephen Lemay, a 26-year veteran of the unique Aqua design period. Lemay’s mission for iOS 27 is reportedly a “Snow Leopard” type intervention—a radical “taming” of the interface targeted on three pillars:

1. The Return of Opacity: Transferring away from high-refraction backgrounds to strong, high-contrast containers that prioritize legibility.
2. GPU Idle Restoration: Concentrating on a 40% discount in baseline GPU exercise by stripping away real-time physics from static screens.
3. Edge Definition: Reintroducing high-contrast borders and “Bodily Depth” to make sure the attention by no means has to “hunt” for a button.

The shift beneath Lemay is philosophical. Below Dye, Apple design grew to become performative—it wished you to look at the glass. Below Lemay, the objective is for the design to vanish once more.

Conclusion: Type Follows Nothing

Liquid Glass failed as a result of it forgot why individuals purchase iPhones. We don’t purchase them to take a look at a digital artwork gallery; we purchase them to get issues executed. By turning the interface into an impediment course of reflections and blurs, Apple traded utility for self-importance.

It was a good looking mistake, a technical marvel that served no grasp aside from the ego of the designers who constructed it.

As we glance towards the “Strong Design” of iOS 27, Liquid Glass will doubtless be remembered alongside the “butterfly keyboard”—a time when Apple bought so caught up in how they might construct one thing, they forgot to ask if they need to.