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.
Last week, Public Beta 2 was released. There is an Austrian YouTube channel ApfelWelt that analyzes every single Apple OS release throughout the year. I have been watching his videos for years (some of them). I finally watched his analysis of iOS 26 Public Beta 2 (Developer Beta 5) last week. He is very laid-back and just compares what has changed from release to release. I was intrigued because he didn’t mention any significant issues with the OS.
So, I took the plunge. I installed iPadOS 26 on one of my iPads. It has been so good that I then installed iOS 26 on my iPhone and macOS 26 on my MacBook Pro. (My main Mac is a Mac mini, which will stay on Sequoia at least until Tahoe is officially released.)
Call me crazy, but I have the feeling that there is a disconnect right now between disgruntled developers who are struggling to get their apps ready and, on the other hand, people like me who just use our Apple devices and who do enjoy a nice fresh-looking new experience. I have to say that I like the new OS a lot. There aren’t many rough edges, and the Liquid Glass saga looks way better than I ever would have expected. There are situations when Liquid Glass does not work very well, but I have not noticed many of those. My devices do not really feel like they are running a beta, which they are.
Though I’m not ready to plunge into the frigid Beta waters, that’s good to hear. I look forward to the official release. What will make it even better is upgrading my iPhone from the 13 Pro Max to the 17 Pro Max, so it will be quite the leap.
Liquid glass is the reason I bought myself a Pixel 9a recently.
I’ve not fully switched over to Android yet and not even sure I will because as a family, we’re pretty well in the Apple ecosystem, but there are some things I think it does much better - number one being that it doesn’t have liquid glass. Seeing the screenshots of the clear icons on the iPhone screen - absolutely not for me!
Mind, there were some other factors at play - like I hate my iPhone 16 with it’s stupid camera button and cut out on cases, so thought I’d try Android again. Buyers remorse for that, as the previous phone was still perfectly fine.
I’m not trilled with LG either but not upgrading to iOS 26 will be the less expensive option. Google will have to deliver their smart glasses at a reasonable price to get me to buy a Pixel.
Me too. It’s in the perfect position for me to click it every time I take my phone out of my pocket!. Which is why I disabled it an hour or two after I took it out of the box.
Not upgrading would work - but combined with other issues I had, I wanted to try something new. Apparently my wife is on a supported RCS carrier here in the UK, so should be able to use messages to still text me.
There are pros and cons to both and some issues are regarding other items around me. For example, sometimes my car tells Carplay that the drivers side is the left hand side and therefore sets up everything on the wrong side, which makes life harder than it needs to be when driving. Android has an override in the settings but Carplay I have to suck it until I turn the car off, get out, lock the car and get back in again!
Yes, you can, but it comes at a price. When I look at the results, I can see why this option is under accessibility.
I am with Steve Troughton-Smith:
It feels like it would be a colossal mistake to frustrate users enough to force them to use this mode en masse, because once somebody get pushed into turning on an accessibility option like this they rarely go back.
My solution is to just use the OS as it is. After using it for several days now, I am sold. There are rare temporary occasions when legibility could be better. I don’t think that this design will be a failure after all.
I installed iPadOS 26 on one of my iPads. It has been so good that I then installed iOS 26 on my iPhone and macOS 26 on my MacBook Pro. (My main Mac is a Mac mini, which will stay on Sequoia at least until Tahoe is officially released.)
