Liquid Glass Toggle in appleOS 26.1 Beta
Even though we’re at the fourth beta of iOS 26.1, Apple is continuing to add new features. In fact, the fourth beta has some of the biggest changes that we’ll get when iOS 26.1 releases to the public later this month.
With the fourth betas of iOS 26.1, iPadOS 26.1, and macOS 26.1, Apple has introduced a new setting that’s designed to allow users to customize the look of Liquid Glass.
The toggle lets users select from a clear look for Liquid Glass, or a tinted look. Clear is the current Liquid Glass design, which is more transparent and shows the background underneath buttons, bars, and menus, while tinted increases the opacity of Liquid Glass and adds more contrast.
We tested the beta to see where the toggle works and what it looks like.
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Apple’s new option looks different in both light and dark mode, increasing opacity in color consistent with each option. It works for Lock Screen notifications and within apps to make menu and navigation bars less transparent, but there is little to no change with other parts of the OS like Control Center, the App Library, and app icons and widgets on the Home Screen.
This toggle being in the display settings with things like Dark Mode is interesting to me. I would have thought that a control like this would land in Accessibility…
I guess they expect a lot of people to want this.
I’m trying it out on iPhone, but for the most part, I really haven’t minded the Clear appearance. Clear feels more fun. But I’m glad Apple added this setting.
Here we are with yet another theme built around translucency, and more complaints about legibility and contrast — Miller writes “Apple says it heard from users throughout the iOS 26 beta testing period that they’d like a setting to manage the opaqueness of the Liquid Glass design”. Now, as has become traditional, there is another way to moderate the excesses of Apple’s new visual language. I am sure there are some who will claim this undermines the entire premise of Liquid Glass, and I do not know that they are entirely wrong. Some might call it greater personalization and customization, too. I think it feels unfocused. Apple keeps revisiting translucency and finding it needs to add more controls to compensate.
Liquid Glass has now transcended to Universal Allegorical Status in iOS 26.1, somehow managing to serve as an example of every possible bad design pattern. Fitting that the final puzzle piece was where all bad design eventually ends up: “If all else fails, make it a setting!”
Apple’s never going to put out a press release that says we fucked up. So you have to look at their actions to see when they have made a miscalculation. For the Photos app, that meant seeing the company effectively completely revert the redesign from iOS 18 in iOS 26, and in the case of liquid glass, it’s seeing this new setting coming just weeks after the public got their hands on the new UI element.
Think about how many collective millions of dollars in time and effort have been spent by developers and designers to try to adopt Liquid Glass in the past year, only to have Apple start to walk it back on the very first minor release since launch. This is an admission, and embarrassing.
Alan Dye told us this was the future of all platforms, critical, amazing, and beautiful. And here we are, at 26.1, allowing users to just totally opt-out. They didn’t even make it ONE CALENDAR QUARTER before starting to roll it back. Why would anyone invest in Liquid Glass now?
This is significant.
I bet iOS 27 drops this setting and adopts something very much like the right-side version as the new default look.
I was almost thinking the opposite 😅 the presence of this gives them cover to make the default more glass-y like WWDC since people can opt out easily & gracefully
Don’t get too excited about the Tinted option. I think it’s disappointing. This is just a slight change of material, not frost. There’s still distracting glass distortion effects, controls are still changing unexpectedly from light to dark to light when scrolling, etc… It’s still liquid glass.
macOS Tahoe 26.1 Beta 4 introduces a new Liquid Glass toggle. You can now choose between clear or tinted.
Can you spot the difference?🤷♂️
At this point, do we even need these square shapes on the background?
So “tinted” actually means “slightly more opaque with increased contrast”? Just like “Reduce transparency” means “increased contrast”, and “increased contrast” means “lots of outlines”. And does any of them actually make the interface less bleached out?
Liquid Glass out here getting me to consider moving back to desktop linux, good job apple design team
Previously:
- On Liquid Glass
- How to Turn Liquid Glass Into a Solid Interface
- Liquid Glass Is Cracked
- Shipping Liquid Glass
Update (2025-10-22): Vidit Bhargava:
I think Apple can do better. I think they can take inspiration from their own pre-iOS 26 “Materials” design language and put them into Liquid Glass.
For Liquid Glass, IMHO Apple should provide a way to pick the type of Liquid Glass, Clear (i.e. the default Liquid Glass), Tinted (with greater blur and a color tint), and Frosted (a new type of material with even greater blur, but also a fun frost texture).
Anyway, the fact the new Liquid Glass in iOS 26.1 Beta 4 is not a true accessibility feature is sensible in the same way the Display Zoom options (also under Display and Brightness) isn’t found in Accessibility. They’re more about personal preference than absolute necessities like, say, the PWM toggle for iPhone 17 models.
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And for those who need the utmost contrast and visual fidelity, they can go into Accessibility and flip on Reduce Transparency to extend the Tinted look even further.
Update (2025-10-24): Adam Engst:
As you can see in the Notification Center screenshot from my previous article, the Tinted version on the right is far more readable. It places a light, opaque background behind notifications and swaps the white text for black. (That’s in Light mode; in Dark mode, they gain a darker background and retain the white text.) However, the Notification Center pane of glass is also lighter, which can make the Flashlight and ChatGPT buttons somewhat less readable than in the default Clear version on the left.
I also took a Clear/Tinted screenshot of a particular photo on my Lock Screen after updating to iOS 26.1b4. The Clear version on the left has so much white in the upper third that “Enter Passcode” and dots are completely invisible, and the 3 is difficult to make out. In contrast, the Tinted version reduces the overall brightness to make everything readable.
I think a way that Liquid Glass could be improved is having “aggregate states”. Liquid when there’s movement, and frosted (“solid”) when static.
That way you get the cool effect when you’re scrolling, and legibility is better when you’re not.
Then it just gets bat shit crazy when you have content flowing behind the sidebar.
To Apple designers who made thins particular change, I promise you no one was getting lost because the UI wasn’t visually stacked this way. I promise you this change wasn’t needed.
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What I really want to see is a toggle that will make things like the text input box not flex and distort when I'm tapping on it, drives me bananas.
I could use the "reduce motion" toggle, but that is way too much, including not getting any animation when swiping up from the bottom.
Haven't touched a single OS 26 beta, developer or public, til this one. It's nice being able to read my notifications without eye strain again. That's my idea of fun, sorry JG.
@gildarts But then it's "solid glass", as opposed to "liquid glass" 🤣
They also walked back some of the interactive highlighting. They were using HDR/XDR color ranges to make them too bright, creating comical results where the text inside a bar was not visible while moving the cursor, because the highlight was brighter than the text. That is now reduced significantly.
This isn't enough. Liquid Ass is still a disaster. Revert the oversized controls, derpy effects, botched corner radii, janky animations, and ruined app icons.
I especially hate:
- The waste-of-space floating / inset sidebars.
- The "my first Photoshop drop shadow" underneath toolbar buttons and the sidebar.
- Menu-to-submenu focus changing the menu background.
- Slowness and jank.
Apple's going from an F-- to an F- by only changing one thing. Full revert to Sequoia or bust. The Desktop is the most productive environment and needs better. Serve users, not the egos of NuApple employees who've never understood the Mac or the UI/UX lessons of old.
This toggle fixes nothing about the horrible Tahoe UI on the Mac. Dumb rounded corners, window titles on the left side instead of centered, background color tinted app windows, dumb ugly borders and backgrounds around controls and sidebars, terrible stutters and pauses, weird issues with various Apple apps.
I'm staying on Sequoia indefinitely and avoiding any new M5 Macs for now because they'll work on Tahoe only. I'm perfectly happy with my Sequoia M4 Macs. The only toggle I'd pay attention to is one named "Fn De Tahoe-ify It" which removes every single dumb Tahoe change and maybe then I'll consider updating.
Oh, the hyperventilating! Calm down. This is exactly what Apple did with Aqua, and just about every major interface change.
@Total What's your point? The changes they made for Yosemite and Big Sur were bad too.
And if you're dismissing this as though Apple is just applying a different skin than before, then you're not paying attention to what everyone is saying.
"What's your point? "
My point is that acting like this is some giant moment in UI history or that Apple is admitting it "fucked up" is ridiculous. It does this for every major change -- goes big and then pulls back on it.
Well my dramatic reaction is because macOS *used* to be my favorite operating system, one that I used every day for work and pleasure, but after a decade of these sorts of big changes, the OS is a steaming pile. And they're never really walked any of them back except in the most mild of ways.
