Proton (PDF):
We believe that Apple’s conduct, as detailed in the complaint we filed, constitutes further violations of US antitrust law. Without this case, Apple could get away with behavior in the US that is already outlawed in the European Union. If this were to happen, American consumers, and developers focused on the American market, would have to pay higher prices for fewer choices, and be left at a disadvantage.
There is also urgency to act now because of a parallel class-action suit by app developers against Apple on May 23, and any settlement there could be binding on all other developers. By joining that lawsuit, we can ensure that this suit will not only be about monetary damages to compensate app developers for the harm caused by Apple’s conduct, but also changes to App Store policies that will improve the state of the internet. We are seeking to permanently end anti-competitive behavior on the App Store, and we are joining this lawsuit to ensure that any future settlement enforces real changes to Apple’s practices and policies to benefit all consumers, developers, and competition, and not just cosmetic changes.
[…]
Companies that monetize user data in exchange for “free” services that abuse your privacy aren’t affected by this, as they don’t process payments through the App Store. However, privacy-first companies that monetize through subscriptions are disproportionately hit by this fee, putting a major barrier toward the adoption of privacy-first business models. Naturally, these are also the very companies Apple is directly competing with through its disingenuous privacy marketing campaigns.
[…]
Apple argues this control is necessary for security reasons. But the reality is that this has made Apple the single point of failure for free speech and a tool of dictatorships. There have been numerous incidents where Apple has removed or censored apps at the behest of authoritarian governments, in order to continue profiting from those markets.
[…]
In 2020, Apple threatened to take Proton VPN out of the App Store unless we removed language from our App Store description that said the app could be used to “unblock censored websites.” We don’t question Apple’s right to act on behalf of authoritarians for the sake of profit, but Apple’s monopoly over iOS app distribution means it can enforce this perverse policy on all app developers, forcing them to also be complicit. We believe it is critical for the future of the internet to end the monopoly on app distribution, so that developers and companies who are prepared to fight for democracy can do so.
Apple also blocked their security update unless they would change the app’s description. The app description had been previously approved with no issues, and the rejection didn’t point to an actual rule violation. This was all after Apple had said that it wouldn’t block bug fix updates.
Proton is also upset that users can’t set Proton Calendar as the default calendar app and that iCloud Drive gets to do background processing stuff that Proton Drive can’t.
Andrew Orr:
Proton seeks an injunction that would require Apple to open iOS to rival app stores and payment services. It also demands monetary compensation for what it calls excessive commissions and the broader competitive harm imposed on developers.
However, they say they will donate any money received from the lawsuit.
Manton Reece:
At this point, I don’t think there’s any doubt that eventually, all around the world, it will be possible to install third-party apps, or use external payments, with minimal interference from Apple. It might still be a bumpy road to get there. This lawsuit is an unfortunate but likely necessary part of the journey.
Previously:
Update (2025-07-01): See also: MacRumors and Hacker News.
Antitrust App Store Apple iOS iOS 18 iOS App iOS Multitasking Lawsuit Legal Privacy Proton Drive Proton VPN Virtual Private Network (VPN)
Riccardo Mori:
I’ve been trying to make sense of Apple’s latest user-interface redesign — Apple calls it Liquid Glass — that will affect all their platforms in the next iteration of their respective OS versions. But it’s hard to make sense of it when, after checking Apple’s own guidance, I’m mostly left with the feeling that at Apple they’re making things up as they go.
[…]
Now take a look at the area I’ve highlighted in the image. 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.
[…]
Another thing that irks me about this obsession with icon simplification is that when you abstract things this much, you dilute their meaning instead of distilling it. Take the progressive degradation of the Dictionary icon, for example. In its subsequent iterations (as soon as it loses the ‘book’ shape), it could just be the icon for a font managing app. Because it ends up losing a lot (if not all) of its uniqueness.
Louie Mantia:
People really expected Apple to shift back toward the kinds of things that made us all fall in love with their platforms and products to begin with. […] But the pendulum never swung back. Instead, we got Liquid Glass.
[…]
And so it seems to me that the people who spearheaded both iOS 7 (2013) and iOS 26 (2025) either did not understand that the visually-rich style from 2001–2013 played such a significant role in Apple’s success or they simply did not care that it did.
[…]
Yet as years go by, we seem to lose more of OS X’s good things. Year after year, draggable borders and frames became thinner until they disappeared. Scrollbars vanished. Stronger contrast softened. We lost the visually rich design in applications and icons. And now, we’ve even lost the ability to make unique icon silhouettes that Apple once specifically retained when introducing the iOS 7 aesthetic to macOS because that was a distinct element of its heritage.
[…]
It’s asking a lot. For almost nothing in return. I keep looking at all the changes Liquid Glass brings, and I cannot find one instance where it has markedly improved the experience in any way.
[…]
But what I am now absolutely sure of is that if the last decade represents Alan Dye’s vision for this platform, then I disagree with it. I don’t trust this direction. I didn’t need the last ten years to see that, but I’m disappointed that in ten years he still doesn’t see it.
Riccardo Mori (Mastodon):
In the past, technology used to be my coping space. A place for a knowledge worker like me to nerd about his tools and related passions — user interfaces, UI/UX design, typography, etc. And if I have developed these passions and interest is largely because of Apple. Apple had a huge impact on my life ever since I started using their computers. I carried out my apprenticeship in Desktop Publishing on a workstation that was comprised of a Macintosh SE, a Bernoulli Box external drive, and a LaserWriter printer back in 1989. I’ve always appreciated the care and attention to detail Apple put in their hardware design but also in their UI design.
But it’s true — something important died with Steve Jobs. He was really Apple’s kernel, for better and for… less better. This Apple has been dismantling Mac OS, as if it’s a foreign tool to them. They’ve bashed its UI around. And they seem to have done that not for the purpose of improving it, but simply for the purpose of changing it; adapting it to their (mostly misguided) idea of unifying the interface of different devices to bring it down to the simplest common denominator.
Francisco Tolmasky:
Well I think it is very clear that Apple does not believe there are new ideas to be had. This is a much deeper discussion, but to me all of their actions are representative of a company that believes technology is “mature” and all that is left to do, at best, is polish. Setting aside whether one agrees with Apple’s decisions/taste/whatever, I think it is not up for discussion that while these changes may be disruptive, they are not, nor are intended to be, “transformative”.
Baked into the explanation that Liquid Glass “frees your content from the tyranny of the UI” is the inescapable admission that you have determined that the highest priority item left for iOS is to “return roughly 40px of screen real estate, or 3% of the vertical space of an iPhone, to users”. That is the important part here. Not whether LG does or doesn’t deliver, but rather that Apple did not find, and thus does not believe there exists, anything more interesting to do in all of 2025.
Dave Polaschek:
Also, there are bugs that have been around for more than six years (I was still working when I reported them) that they could have been fixing, but those don’t even get looked at. They’re too busy making new bugs instead.
Previously:
Update (2025-07-04): Francisco Tolmasky:
Fashion is the state an industry degrades to once all the available innovation has been exhausted.
It is the “white dwarf” conclusion for fields with insufficient justifiable change to provide an indefinite source of legitimate novelty. The term we use to identify the fields that defy this destiny is “technology”.
If you want to understand Apple’s insistence on a yearly update schedule, you must first understand that Apple no longer sees their software as technology, but rather as fashion.
This explains the seeming disconnect between Apple and its users: how can Apple remove key features “we depend on” so callously, in fact, oftentimes proudly? The stakes seem high to “us” and low to “them”.
But Apple’s position makes perfect sense if you view each of these features not as a step towards or away from some theoretical target “ideal functionality,” but rather as a “fashion trend” that is either still “in” or “out of” style.
John Gruber:
I have never once gotten the impression that anyone on Alan Dye’s UI team uses serious pro tool apps. They love making beautiful looking things, not solving difficult UI problems with clever solutions. And I suspect when confronted with difficult UI problems, they say “Shut up with that nerd stuff.”
Louie Mantia, Jr.:
You know, I could write a whole blog post about this—and I might—but I think we need to start addressing the very likely possibility that the entire thesis that “UI should get out of the way” and “apps should focus on content” is wrong.
Apps aren’t just for looking at photos or videos. They’re for navigating through these things, organizing them, editing them. The tools to do those things should not get out of the way. They should be clearly defined and separate from the content.
The problem is not the introduction of glass as an element of the visual design language. If used as the Dock background alone, it would be totally fine! But because someone said “UI should get out of the way” and no one challenged it—instead of content literally being the focus, Apple has to intentionally put content out of focus (blurring) to make the glass elements visible. They have to put a gradient behind the glass so you can see it. That should’ve been the “oh, it doesn’t work” moment.
But here we are with a new visual design language that somehow manages to compromise on both the content area and the UI.
Marco Arment:
Liquid Glass’ blurred content everywhere is especially cruel to those of us who use reading glasses or progressives.
The reflex to seeing blurry text on our phones is to adjust our sight angle or distance to sharpen it. But, of course, it’s not our fault, doesn’t sharpen, and just causes eyestrain.
Text on my phone should never be blurry.
Greg Pierce:
I’m still optimistic about some of the elements of Liquid Glass, but, so far, every change I’ve made to adapt to the look has directly reduced the visibility user’s content and the accessibility of important functions.
Having spent the weekend with my parents, less visibility will be a disaster for them. The (…) button scares them.
Jesper:
There are two stages to this, in two different axes (being: icons and the general UI).
The first stage is: I can't believe that Apple is doing their developers and their ecosystem dirty this way. In which way does someone look at all this and imagine that this will be sufficient for developers to express what they want to express? Look at the progression to this point, look at what is given up and look at for what. Negligible wins in screen space even on the most space constrained devices (aside from Apple Watch, where the layering and overlapping is highly limited to begin with), and effects that are technically impressive but not in the apparent service of any particular goal.
The second stage is: I can't believe that Apple is doing this to themselves. To their own icons and their own user interfaces. I have yet to find a single user interface in their own OS, in the most-baked Liquid Glass UIs currently in existence, that is functionally improved. There are loads of them that have been functionally and hierarchically crippled.
[…]
The Bas Ording school sometimes uses a neat effect to enable new functionality (seeing more things with Dock magnification, keeping track of where things go with windows animating in and out of sheets and the dock, shrinking and moving around with Exposé). But the effect was never the point. The visuals were tweaked from version to version and certainly changed over time.
The Alan Dye school always starts with dropping a manifesto. […] None of the interfaces seem like they were iterated on in order to increase usability, readability, utility or understandability in the slightest. […] As far as I can tell, Apple's just lost its sense of UI design priorities completely.
Benjamin Mayo:
In fact, the act of squishing controls into a single row actually
exacerbates the relative lack of screen real estate in the horizontal axis.
With iPhone dimensions as they are, horizontal space is constrained,
and you have to be very selective about what can fit in the bounds of
the screen’s width. Inevitably, this means important items must be
hidden away.
[…]
Personally, I find the minimisation trend most egregious in the Music
app.
Jonathan Wight:
I know zero former coworkers at Apple who actually like Liquid Glass. Every single time it has come up in conversation so far the reaction has been negative.
I am in two group-chats with ex-Apple folks and both chats have devolved into Liquid Glass hate-fests.
Sean Heber:
Pretty frustrated with all of the iOS/iPad/macOS 26… everything.
I feel like suddenly nothing works. I can’t do anything I want to do. And everything is broken. It feels like a giant waste of time churning.
Matt Birchler:
There are plenty of times where the UI looks positively gorgeous. In the Apple Music screenshot above, I think those elements look stunning, and they look even better in motion as content swirls around the background as I scroll. I also really like the address bar at the bottom of Safari, which really comes to life when scrolling sites with fun colors. Tellingly, I have an iPhone still on iOS 18 and it does feel a bit dull in comparison.
But there are also times where it doesn't look great and can be genuinely hard to read. This got better in the second round of betas, but it's definitely not completely fixed yet. And even when it is working right, UI elements bounce from what I can only describe as light mode to dark mode over and over as their background content changes. I find this distracting and visually unpleasant.
Louie Mantia, Jr. (Mastodon):
But my gosh, this is a multi-trillion dollar company that’s getting free design critique from people who love and rely on these platforms the most. For free. Absolutely nothing in return. It’s almost as if we’re all posting about it because of desperation. So many of us are hoping this really isn’t what we have to live with for the next five or ten years. Despite knowing it will take time away from the things we’d much rather be doing, we’re writing blog posts and recording podcasts and posting on social media anyway.
[…]
App icons are all over the place. In some ways, they gained detail, in others, they lost detail. Almost every icon has an unfortunate concession to fit into this Liquid Glass model.
[…]
But what I can’t help but notice for 12 years now is that without visual effects serving to differentiate one control from another, we’ve lost immediate recognition of different UI elements. Title bars merged with toolbars. Toolbars merged with tab bars. Is this icon an action or a tab? Will it open a menu or switch the view? It’s anybody’s guess. The conflation of basically all these UI elements with iOS 7 and a step further with Liquid Glass in the 26 release makes me think someone doesn’t understand there is a difference between these kinds of UI elements. Or maybe they don’t care about the difference.
[…]
Every time I see an issue, I ask, “What problem is this solving?” And every time, there is no answer. There is seemingly no benefit to any of this. That isn’t to say there aren’t good UI changes in this release. It’s just that some of these visual decisions are impacting the UI. Instead of working together, they seem to be at odds with each other.
[…]
At the point when you have to blur the content area to make the UI stand out from it, how can you possibly argue that it gets out of the way? It makes no sense.
Update (2025-07-08): See more screenshots from Louie Mantia, Jr.
Update (2025-07-14): Craig Grannell (Mastodon):
The guidance I – and, I’m sure, others – have provided multiple times to Apple is that motion that cannot be controlled by the user should ideally be removed; which, in reality, has meant being replaced by a crossfade – good enough for most users with vestibular issues. You’ll see this if you activate Reduce Motion on your iPhone. The 3D zoom ‘blast’ when opening folders will be gone. As will other animations, such as when you move through menu hierarchies. (At least in software that doesn’t use its own proprietary animations that ignore Reduce Motion, such as RSS client Reeder.)
What people often don’t realise is that even small/fast pop-out menu animations can be enough to ‘blast’ someone to the point they can be made dizzy. Additionally, transforming static to animated UI via refraction is a potential trigger.
Previously:
Update (2025-07-18): Louie Mantia (Mastodon):
Firstly, I maintain that it makes absolutely no sense that Alan Dye has the power he has, because he simply has no taste. But what’s worse is that he wields that power so clumsily, so carelessly. And because it goes unchallenged, unchecked by someone higher than him, the entire industry suffers the consequences.
[…]
Another reason that the industry is showing signs of reluctance is because Alan Dye did not prove he understood the platform, any platform, before he assumed the role of its lead designer. He’s not just a newcomer to these platforms, but to software design as a whole. He never had any experience creating anything for Apple platforms before he was entrusted with this position. That’s crazy.
[…]
Whatever actually happened, by letting Scott go, Tim significantly altered the course for Apple. It has since become almost a parody of itself as a luxury brand. In my own estimation, Jony didn’t just lack experience in software design, he never respected the profession.
[…]
Apple does not have answers for everything they uprooted. Fundamental UI paradigms have been recklessly reorganized. Carelessly compartmentalized. That any of this has been done without every consideration to the vast amounts of collective work that third-party designers and developers have to do to in their own products is just simply unconscionable.
The Figma design kit is finally available.
Eric Schwarz:
One thing that has really irked me in the past couple of years of the Alan Dye era is this notion of hiding controls so “content can be the focus”—I don’t want my browser to have less controls or usable navigation just so that we can see 1/8” more of a web page (or in some ways, the same amount because of the larger controls and poorer spacing.) Likewise, the content is the controls on some apps. His style seems to focus on what might look good on a product marketing picture, but is cumbersome to actually use.
Look at what’s happened to the Calendar icon.
mitten:
I just do not understand why they are making the icons out of focus and soft. It’s just so bizarre. The new Photos icon is one of the worst in this regard.
Update (2025-07-23): Christian:
I am flummoxed to be honest. This is looking crazily bad. When I saw the WWDC keynote, I was not that skeptical about it, but now… I am not so sure. The UI is looking so glassy that it almost is illegible to my eyes.
Craig Hockenberry:
Getting the feeling that Apple has no fucking idea what it’s doing with Liquid Glass.
And that’s going to make it a rough fall for everyone.
Mario Guzmán:
I thought I was being cynical about Liquid Glass but there are A LOT more of you who also fucking hate this shit as much as I do… so I feel like my feelings on Liquid Glass really aren’t crazy.
Colin Cornaby:
The weirdest thing about the Liquid Glass thing is they picked an entirely different glass material than visionOS where this is working well.
Max van IJsselmuiden (Hacker News):
My initial thought was: they’re getting people used to transparent UIs for spatial computing (mixed reality environments where digital interfaces blend with the physical world). My immediate second thought was, ‘wow, you can’t read a thing - are they serious?’.
[…]
The problem with Liquid Glass isn’t transparency itself. It’s that Apple is prioritizing visual consistency over readability. While this creates visual unity, it diminishes usability on traditional interfaces where transparency serves no functional purpose. Look at the screenshots: text becomes harder to read when layered over busy backgrounds. Interface elements blend together. What should be clear visual hierarchies become muddled.
[…]
Apple’s Liquid Glass may win design accolades, but history suggests it will join the long list of beautiful solutions that made computing harder, not easier, for the people who actually have to use it every day.
Garrett Murray:
So, about Liquid Glass: It’s a giant mess and quite bad. Looks okay in a show reel, but bad in use.
Could Apple keep refining it over time to get it to a better place? OF COURSE. That's not the point. This is an upending of the UI/UX for ALL of Apple’s platforms with an extremely suspect reason (“get the UI out of the way for your content!”), and it's thousands of hours of work for devs to update.
What do USERS gain? Well, currently (yes, I know it's a beta!) lack of contrast, constant animating surfaces and effects, transparency everywhere, wasted space, ugly color layering, etc. Things are harder to read, animate and flash continuously, but the actual OS isn't any better for it.
Louie Mantia:
Basically every industry professional is sounding the alarm, huh. Either Apple didn’t know Liquid Glass was bad or they didn’t think it would go over this poorly.
Either way, it feels entirely preventable. The risk is huge. The payoff is… infinitesimal. Apple gains basically nothing with Liquid Glass, while risking the house. …why.
[…]
I don’t know if Tim Cook is just chasing legacy or what, but Apple’s entirely losing what made them special while he and other execs invent new problems to solve.
Previously:
Update (2025-07-25): Michael Flarup:
People who only see the light bending into a prism flare along a refractive edge will lament the frivolousness of such nonsense visual flair. These people do not see where we are heading and how computing surfaces will have to adapt. To them, Liquid Glass is discarded as a useless gimmick.
[…]
To add insult to injury, the new Tahoe icons are mostly a downgrade. They are less clear, not as well crafted and arbitrarily restricted.
[…]
One of the reasons the new Tahoe icons can feel “blurry” is the uniform specular highlight applied across all layers. On lighter backgrounds, it reduces contrast and muddies detail.
[…]
There’s a certain aesthetic playfulness to Liquid Glass that is going to define this next era of visual design. And while I might disagree with some of the compromises they’ve had to make for it to span the platforms, I do celebrate the direction.
See also: Marques Brownlee.
Update (2025-07-29): Louie Mantia:
I really can’t get it out of my head that Apple is trying to force every other company to do some mild rebranding right now. Like how many companies out there are rethinking not just the visuals of their app, but how their logo looks as an app icon in ways that are not congruous with their existing brand? Woof.
Steven Frank:
It’s not so much that Liquid Glass looks bad, which it does, but that without a doubt in my mind there were people in every department saying, look, maybe we shouldn’t ship an OS where you can’t read the text. And yet here we are anyway.
I know, the readability ship left the port a few versions ago -- my larger point: it’s not the look that stings the most, but knowing that the expert people who understand and genuinely care about the human interaction problems have either already left or aren’t being listened to.
Obviously this is an industry-wide plague, but it’s most noticeable with Apple because, damn it, they used to be the best in the world at this and it’s all so unnecessarily self-inflicted.
Trezzer:
What I was most surprised by is how much space the UI takes up. Safari is just gigantic, and while it partly slides out of the way (meaning you have to tap it that many times more to navigate and swipe back isn’t working any more), it still feels like baby’s first browser when you see it. I hope other browsers stick to their guns, because I plan on moving away from Safari unless they make significant UI improvements.
Update (2025-08-01): The Talk Show (Mastodon):
Special guest Louie Mantia joins the show to talk about Liquid Glass, the various OS 26 updates, and the worrisome state of Apple’s UI design overall.
Marc Palmer:
Friday design spice: in the Apple HIG, whoever made this diagram for visionOS button states must surely have said “eh… are we sure about this?”.
Update (2025-08-13): Matt Gemmell:
Liquid Glass is the kind of thing that would happen if someone with no UX design experience was put in charge of design, had no opinions on the matter so asked for suggestions, then approved the ideas from the youngest and least design-experienced people who could implement the most flashy demo.
It is thus, comprehensively and multifariously, Not What Apple (Used To) Do. An emblem of the sickness in the company, driven by moribund leadership, dilute focus, and ever more stagnant insight.
Accessibility Alan Dye Design Icons iOS iOS 26 Liquid Glass Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Safari
