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.
[…]
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
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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.
