I do not want to bash iOS26 and I am aware that it still is in beta. But…
I am flummoxed to be honest. This is looking crazily bad. When I saw the WWDC keynote, I was not that skeptical about it, but now… I am not so sure. The UI is looking so glassy that it almost is illegible to my eyes.
I am a heavy ForScore user. From the app’s developer:
A new design he can “live with”, “adaptivity of some glass elements looks so bad”… And this for an app that depends on presenting complex music scores that need to be legible…
It looked as if Beta 3 did mitigate the issues to some degree, apparently Beta 4 did swing back to the glassy side of things. Is anybody running the latest Beta? Has it gotten worse in comparison to Beta 3?
Less than two months until it will be released and almost two months since the first developer beta… I am starting to doubt Apple’s course…
When Apple announced Liquid Glass, it looked like a consolation prize for their failure to deliver Apple Intelligence. Maybe something they were developing for 2027? that they pulled forward to entice a few people to upgrade their iPhone?
I’m not up in arms. All my devices are 1 or 2 years old and, at this point, I have no plans to upgrade. Problem solved.
I have never done that. I always am eager to upgrade because I am … maybe a bit unreasonable and I love the “new and shiny”. But this really could be the first time also for me to wait…
In the case of macOS, I think back with beta 3, they have added a config setting to turn off the Liquid Glass transparency of the menu bar. Transparency can be reduced overall in Accessibility. I find it telling that making the system usable is an accessibility option.
It’s funny - I was running Betas 1-3 on my iPads and finally decided (based on Beta 3) to put Beta 4 on my phone. Oops. They’re not wrong. I don’t see how this can ship in a few months.
I normally upgrade annually but this year I’m keeping my powder dry to have more set aside for the folding phone in 2026. I am very eager to see if that form factor means I travel with my iPad less.
I have beta 4 on my iPad mini. It’s still rough even without considering readability issues due to Liquid Glass.
Like my Apple Pencil Pro doesn’t work at all most of the time. Like glitches in many apps, as well as the OS screens. YouTube videos often play completely black for the first 5 seconds or so. The software keyboard plays very badly with text entry boxes on websites (like this one) in landscape mode — the cursor shows in the wrong place but is always visible, meaning often it’s the text you’re typing that you can’t see. Curiously, it works fine in portrait.
Even the screen that offered the update from b3 to b4 had a rapidly moving “Update now” button.
I’ve jumped in around b4/public beta time on numerous releases and things have been largely reliable. Not this year.
