iOS 26 Developer Beta 3
In some apps like Apple Music, Podcasts, and the App Store, Apple has toned down the transparency of the navigation bars. The look is more opaque to make the buttons more legible.
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Apple added new color options for the default “iOS” wallpaper that it designed for iOS 26 , so now we have Halo, Dusk, Sky, and Shadow.
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Apple tweaked the blue and green colors for the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, AirDrop, and Cellular Toggles. The colors are brighter and more in line with the other colors in Control Center.
Apple’s new Liquid Glass design language just got a little more… frosted. In the third iOS 26 developer beta, Apple dialed back the transparency of navigation bars, buttons, and tabs that once allowed you to clearly see the content beneath them.
Here are just a few more examples of iOS 26 beta 2 and iOS 26 beta 3 visual changes[…]
It’s subtle…
iOS 26 Beta 2 vs iOS 26 Beta 3 Music nav bar.
I’ve collected a few that stand out to me.
Liquid Glass officially has two appearances: clear and “regular”, which is frosted. If there have been any changes to the clear style in any of the betas, I cannot say I have noticed them. But the frosted style has become steadily more opaque since the first developer build of iOS 26 in some places. In particular, when iOS is in light mode and the screen is predominantly white, like the buttons in a Mail message, the effect is now extremely subtle, to the point where I wonder if there is a third Liquid Glass appearance.
I know a lot of people are going to be disappointed it isn’t as flashy as the first beta, but it still looks nice and readability is way up.
Also, there’s a fair few places where stuff is now completely opaque which I think is probably a bug.
Apple significantly toned down Liquid Glass in iOS 26 beta 3 and, honestly, I’m a fan.
Looks modern without feeling like a gimmick with (unfixable?) legibility issues. Still not perfect, but better IMO.
It’s better, but I still think the entire concept is wrong and that at the very least they should tone it down even more.
Seems iOS 26 beta 3 is the equivalent of iOS 7 beta 3 where the most extreme design elements are finally dialed back — remember Helvetica Neue Ultra Light?
One of the stranger qualities of this year’s Liquid Glass visual update is how much it is changing within just a few weeks. One would assume some designers with power at Apple would have recognized the illegibility of the first version before it was made available in June. Alas, it seems Apple is working things out in public now.
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Though I know there were changes in different releases of the iOS 7 development cycle, the first thing I thought of was the progression of Aqua in early builds of Mac OS X, first revealed in the second developer preview of 10.0. The most noticeable changes happened in the dock which, in the second and third previews, looked like a set of individual sometimes-underlined tiles. Those builds were released in January and February 2000; by the fourth preview, in May, the dock was closer to the version which eventually shipped. But those changes took place over many months; Mac OS X 10.0 did not ship to the public until March 2001. Complaints about the legibility of various translucent elements, however, were whittled away at for years to come.
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But, also, you would think a company that has been working with transparent interfaces for twenty-five years would have some institutional memory and know what to avoid.
I repeat—anyone who has tried to make translucent UI is familiar with the story being played out right now. The core issue is that translucent UI is fundamentally flawed. You cannot make it too translucent without sacrifice. But every sacrifice you make makes it less cool. That’s why they started where they did. That’s why they are where they are now. It’s embarrassing to re-tread known issues like this. This could have been an exercise internally that no one ever saw.
The thing that kills me is that this is not Alan Dye’s first rodeo. That was iOS 7. His first go at doing software design was fixated on this same thing: translucency. It’s as if he can’t let it go, forcing everyone else to tag along while he makes discoveries the rest of us have known for quite some time. It’s awful being the end user of a product designed by someone who is effectively saying, “Oh, it’s illegible? Interesting. I didn’t know that.”
I think Microsoft kind of nailed it with Aero almost 15-20 years ago (especially when in matured with Windows 7)
I don’t remember any legibility issues back then - but because they used this glass material only as a “chrome” - window borders, backgrounds - on top of this „glass” we had placed “normal” opaque controls.
Limiting it to the chrome is certainly better, but I still don’t see what the point of a transparent title bar is Who wants to read skinny text atop crazy background?
You know what this is? iOS 15. Technically, 4 years old. Visually, absolutely fine. Why not work on bettering the parts of the UI that can be improved, while maintaining an organic look that ‘ages well’ and remains fresh, instead of doing a shallow facelift that really looks like the facelift certain Hollywood stars make to keep looking young, while ending up actually looking weird?
Previously:
Update (2025-07-09): Michael Flarup:
Is this better?
There was little outcry over the updates that Apple made in the second beta, but the third beta’s design updates have frustrated some users who feel that Apple is removing too much of the Liquid Glass aesthetic.
There are some really poor Liquid Glass comparison shots going around comparing between dark mode and light mode that have convinced the normies and YouTubers that Apple has turned off the effect completely, which is nonsense. Beta 3 is still glassy af.
Update (2025-07-10): Federico Viticci:
The more time I spend with Liquid Glass, the more I don’t understand Alan Dye’s and the design team’s obsession with minimizing UI chrome and “prioritizing content” instead.
With collapsed tab bars in iOS 26, it now takes me two taps to switch between Library and Music.
Is that…better? The animations are gorgeous, sure. But does it actually work better? 🤔
Alan Dye doesn’t design UI.
He hides it.
In March, Apple said that it planned to add support for end-to-end encrypted RCS messages to the Messages app in future iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS software updates, and we are still waiting for that to happen. As of the third developer beta of iOS 26 released this week, the upgrade has yet to be implemented on iPhones.
Previously:
Update (2025-07-11): Aaron Pearce:
Really hope Apple fixes this Liquid Glass bug where it ignore the actual background and goes to the scroll view content behind it.
Update (2025-07-15): Mario Guzmán:
I know this is still in beta but I assume that I should be able to read the number labels in each button… right? /s #liquidglass
Looks like they were able to achieve this but using that new view that mirrors the content on the edges in order to extend it outward… sorta like what macOS does to extend shit under the fLoAtiNg sidebar.
You’re telling me that there was 1,000 “nos” before this “yes”???
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Textbook example of what happens when all reasoning boils down to "Because we can".
Apple have these crazy good chips in their phones that can't be used for anything meaningful (or plain stupid as it's the case with the RAM choked llm thing). Why not use it to live emulate convex glass?
Why not? Give me a single reason why not. Only Apple!
My eyes are not the same as they were a few years ago. Sometimes I can read tiny letters on my iPhone, often I can't and need pinch-to-zoom. The brain is amazingly good in recognizing whole words or even half sentences at once. You all know the example of recognizing a sentence where each word still has the correct first and last letter, but some of the middle letters are shuffled, right? That works because the brain expects and predicts the following words in a sentence, much like AI predicts which word to add when generating text.
Well, that doesn't work for numbers *at all*, since you cannot predict the digits. You have to recognize digits one.by.one. So I always need pinch-to-zoom for numbers when the fontsize still allows me to recognize words.
Since Apple started to make iPhones in different sizes in 2014 (the 6 Plus), I always bought the largest one. Before that I even tried to use the iPad Mini 1st gen in 2013 as my main device for some time - if only it could run the phone app...
At home I use my iPad way more than my iPhone, at work my Mac of course. But when I'm out and about I need something handy.
Mail.app is the most important iPhone app for me on the go - and on iOS 26 mail is a disaster!
With iOS 18 and before, I could rotate my phone to landscape, and Mail.app would show the mail content in a slightly larger fontsize, which was perfect for me (and probably hundreds of millions of adults older than 35). That's exactly the reason I am buying the larger (and more expensive) iPhone Pro Max. I need that space...
But on iOS 26, the mail layout changed to always show the list of mails on the left half of the screen and the current mail content in the right half. Thus you now have *less* space for the content than in portrait mode. You cannot hide the list and have the full width for the content anymore.
THAT'S AN ABOLUTE CATASTROPHE!
I will downgrade my iPhone to iOS 18 again and refuse to update until that mistake is fixed. At least have a preference setting:
[ ] show two column layout in landscape, default = OFF.
The person responsible for that layout change should be fired - because (s)he was definitely not talking to elder user groups when making that decision, and thus is incompetent for the job.
It just remains so strange to me that they release a bold new design that supposedly has this clear purpose and then…dial it back entirely because it was unusable.
How did an elite company even as a beta so boldly release something so clearly broken? Did no one test it? I genuinely do not understand.
Apple is widely known for having some of the best accessibility support in the world, being literally the only option for many people who do not have standard vision, motor, etc.
But their base design doesn’t work for anyone, takes something that already had the bar lowered and lowers it even further in terms of actual functionality and legibility etc.
It just seems like there is a huge disconnect between so many parts of the company in so many ways. Which I suppose leads me backwards into another criticism of Tim Cook, since as I understand it that is his job. To unify the different parts of the company under a coherent vision.
