Liquid Glass 27 Slider
Apple said it has heard user feedback, which it “deeply appreciates,” and is now making adjustments to the underlying foundations of how Liquid Glass is constructed. Chief among those changes is a new slider that lets users control transparency, ranging from fully opaque to completely clear.
As well as offering this new degree of customization, Apple is also changing the default way the glass material is rendered, to improve contrast and provide an even more vibrant visual look.
It’s definitely improved. I’m not sure it’s better than pre–Liquid Glass, though. I’m reserving judgement until I use it more, but I’m skeptical of the slider being a good solution. Previously, even going “full” opaque with the Reduce Transparency accessibility setting didn’t make it look good. The slider doesn’t even go as far as that, and I’m not really sure what the point of providing the intermediate options is.
I laughed out loud when that slider showed up in the keynote 😂
Can confirm that if you want to reduce the effects of Liquid Glass as much as possible, using Reduce Transparency in the Accessibility settings on iOS is still the way to go over the new slider that was introduced.
A setting to tint or clear liquid glass?!? Adding UI sliders like this isn’t design.
Design is making a choice, weighing the options and picking the best option.
I’m disappointed at the lack of deeper changes to Liquid Glass, they’re not really addressing the fundamental problem that this is an AI designed to look good superimposed over colorful feeds or photos or whatever and looks annoying and bland on top of plain text
iOS 27 Liquid Glass is more “bubble” than glass to me. More sharp on the edges.
Tell me that’s not Aqua
“We improved Liquid Glass by letting you reduce the effects until there’s no more Liquid Glass”
Well, that’s nice.
The line weights on the new Liquid Glass button elements are so thin that it looks pretty bad when not at 100% scale…
Which it will almost never be on macOS, iPadOS, in the iOS Simulator, or in screenshots… 👀
Since the release of macOS 26 Tahoe, some users have defended the changes made by Apple - specifically, the implementation of Liquid Glass - as being a forward-thinking design was unproblematic, despite many clear and obvious objections that had sound reasoning. These were routinely dismissed as a “You’re holding it wrong” mentality.
[…]
Apple should never have released Tahoe in the state that it was, and I was pleasantly pleased to see that Golden Gate looks like a return to focus on quality and attention to detail.
I think this is about how close we will get to “yeah we messed up Liquid Glass lmao”
Apple very rarely admits mistakes. The fact that they’re rolling back some of the extremeness in Liquid Glass and actively mentioned in the keynote that they very seriously took user feedback, shows just how bad some of it was.
Yes, we need to be able to read text.
Well, that’s the closest Apple is ever going to get to saying “We fucked this up and are rowing back.”
Translation for this new Liquid Glass: We fucked up, our bad.
Hey, I’ll take it.
Two conflicting things can be true at the same time:
- I quite like how retro and Aqua ╳ iOS 6 the new version of Liquid Glass looks
- I feel like the changes to Liquid Glass are a colossal rug-pull that invalidate much of the last 12 months of my development efforts across all my apps
Just as it’s more costly for users and developers when Apple rushes to ship features before ironing out the bugs, massive design changes like iOS 7 and Liquid Glass, released without adequate testing and refinement, waste developer time and burden users with poor design while they wait for Apple to figure out what it actually wants to do.
There’s a chunk of my developer timeline that is very confused that the face-eating leopards are eating their face.
My dudes (all dudes): Apple always tells you to jump. You always jumped. It’s just now you’re realising the giant corporation that will always operate in their best interest is not actually aligned with you. You conformed to it.
…but you’ll keep doing it.
If you want to support macOS Sequoia, you’re now going to have to support three different UI styles. If you want to skip the macOS 26 version of Liquid Glass, you’re going to have to drop support for users on Intel Macs. It’s a no-win situation.
Previously:
- macOS Golden Gate 27 Announced
- iPadOS 27 Announced
- iOS 27 Announced
- WWDC 2026 Keynote
- Liquid Glass Toggle in appleOS 26.1 Beta
- How to Turn Liquid Glass Into a Solid Interface
1 Comment RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
"If you want to support macOS Sequoia, you’re now going to have to support three different UI styles. If you want to skip the macOS 26 version of Liquid Glass, you’re going to have to drop support for users on Intel Macs. It’s a no-win situation."
Eletron devs laughing all the way to the bank.
