iOS 26 beta 3 dials back Liquid Glass

anchpop 7/7/2025|

I love the liquid glass look and have helped multiple non-techie people install the developer beta just because they were excited to experience "the frutiger aero update". (frutiger aero is a bit of a meme on tiktok right now so that might be why.) It's fun to hate on apple and the ridiculous level of glass on the control center was pretty funny, but I do think they knocked it out of the park with this one, in terms of mass appeal.

The one issue is that everyone on the beta says their phone is slower now. Which is probably not because of the liquid glass effect, since I think that should be doable with just a couple of texture lookups. (One of those funny things about computer graphics is that often the most visually impressive effects are the simplest computationally - compare this to a "proper" gaussian blur, which is quite expensive.)

3cats-in-a-coat 7/9/2025||

Each glass layer is something like 5 shader layers, all of them running something different than a basic alpha blend, looking up content from close to far away. Those "couple of texture lookups" (more like a dozen, if you add the filtering) add up pretty fast, also to be able to look up textures, you need to render each of the textures in a distinct buffer, and so on.

Saying this won't tax the battery is ridiculous. And if it was for something "impressive" I might see the ROI.

But it's a basic UI control. A button, a slider. And it's not impressive, it's distracting. The whole idea of glass in UI is to make a control less apparent. To make it fit with the content, blend in, be less distracting. But when light rapidly bends and twists behind in the refraction, the effect (in motion) is more like "STOP LOOKING AT YOUR CONTENT, LOOK AT ME".

This is... I don't know what the exact opposite of good design is. It's not "bad". Bad is not knowing what you're doing. This looks intentionally done to be as terrible as it can be, with laser-sharp malice.

I remember when Microsoft was ensuring us all Vista won't tax the performance of the computer, it's all hyper-optimized, don't worry about it. And theirs was a much simpler glass effect. What happened then? Windows 7 simplified the effect for performance reasons, and Windows 8 and 10 completely removed it, because it was too heavy...

Use common sense. Liquid Glass is more difficult to compute due to the refraction and "global illumination" effects, and it's running on tiny power starved devices. Even a DAMN WATCH. How is that supposed to magically not matter?

browningstreet 7/8/2025||

> The one issue is that everyone on the beta says their phone is slower now.

Developer betas often have debug code enabled and optimizations usually arrive last.

sillywalk 7/7/2025||

I just hope there's (still) an accessibility option to turn off all that transparent shit.

Since GUIs became (flat) UX, everything has gotten worse.

Get off my lawn.