I think I'm convinced with liquid glass design, the issues highlighted by the users in the beta release IMHO are a result of rushing it out for WWDC. It appears that they didn't have enough time to polish the UI to comply with the principles described in this video.
For example the designer in this video says no glass over glass but the control center and the lock screen are glass over glass. It looks cluttered and the legibility is horrible, as predicted by the designers here.
They probably just compiled the old UI with the new liquid glass framework without going through the design considerations that are required by the new system.
By the time of the release, it will look great if Apple doesn't shy away from letting their developers re-work everything.
What I wonder now is, why hadn't that happen already? Don't the internal developers have access to the new design and the people behind it until the last moment? If the designers of Liquid Glass and the designers of the locks screen and the control center have talked, they would have known the principles described in the WWDC video and avoid all that.
I was a student taking an android dev course when the first iteration of material design came out. My classmates and I had the running joke of “this is an amazing design guide, someone should send it to google”.
You’d see even the most specific principles being broken, the left menu in gmail for example interacted with the header exactly the opposite way the guide said it should.
The main issue I feel is that Apple's internal threshold for what quality of software is acceptable to be launched to the public has dropped a lot in the years since the last major redesign.
Yes, they iterate through versions and drop things that don't work with their design philosophy (parallax effects on iOS 7) but the first major version they released always seemed well thought out and solid from a design perspective.
I don't get that feeling from this redesign. I'm sure that this Liquid Glass redesign would look and work great next year or the year after that or even by the public launch of iOS 26. They'll fix the issues with readability, control center etc. But the fact that the first version of Liquid Glass doesn't look good is what's problematic.
iOS 7's first beta design was worse than this. They walked back some pretty distinctive parts of the design - mainly the ultra thin fonts - during the betas and following releases.
This hasn’t been “launched to the public”. It’s a developer beta so that developers can start working on testing and updating their apps for the new OS.
You're right that this isn't "launched to the public" and is just a developer beta. However, I meant it in a more "outside of Apple" kind of way. I guess that should have been clearer.
Everyone at Apple knows WWDC is in June, and WWDC is the event where Apple show off the new stuff and deliver a public beta. Some of the terrible designs were shown in the pre-recorded demos, and if anyone had used the new beta for more than five minutes, they would have ended up in the broken control center.
It’s also the biggest software event in the Apple world. The implementation may improve, but the pre-recorded demo videos show off the bad parts pretty clearly, almost as if the terrible readability is intentional.
If you're right, maybe the reason they rushed it is because people accuse Apple of copying others if they take time to do something right
However, it is also true that Apple's QA gets bad lately. They let features creep but lose attention to detail so there are more small glitches recently. Along with just bad design, like surely the old Apple would not allow mouse cursor to be "lost" in the notch on the new MBPs. Maybe it's the trend. They become less and less about getting it right and more about getting it out and then reacting when users complain.
> because people accuse Apple of copying others if they take time to do something right
Windows Vista had a translucent UI nearly two decades ago, that should be enough time for Apple to figure out if it's a good or bad idea to copy ;)
There's also plenty of computer games which experiment with translucency in their UIs.
If the Apple UI designers would look out of their ivory tower from time to time they could have realized that translucent UIs are an exceptionally stupid idea after the very shortlived "oooooh fancy shaders" novelty effect is over.
Tbh, I get strong flat-earther vibes from that video ;) E.g. trying to justify a stupid base assumptiom with pseudo-science.
I predict that in 2..5 years Apple will go back to regular opaque UI elements with a slight 3D hint to separate items that can be interacted with from non-interactive items.
Windows users might be lucky when Microsoft skips that fashion cycle by saying "been there, done that".
> Windows users might be lucky when Microsoft skips that fashion cycle by saying "been there, done that".
Given Microsoft’s track record, I’d expect worse, not better. Metro might’ve looked good on phones, but the desktop incarnation was pretty ugly (it was basically Windows 1.0 with antialiasing) compared to Aero. It would be completely on brand for them to do something like ditch their current reasonably nice looking Fluent in favor of something hideous and then stubbornly try to make it work without changes for the next decade before finally relenting.
For example the designer in this video says no glass over glass but the control center and the lock screen are glass over glass. It looks cluttered and the legibility is horrible, as predicted by the designers here.
They probably just compiled the old UI with the new liquid glass framework without going through the design considerations that are required by the new system.
By the time of the release, it will look great if Apple doesn't shy away from letting their developers re-work everything.
What I wonder now is, why hadn't that happen already? Don't the internal developers have access to the new design and the people behind it until the last moment? If the designers of Liquid Glass and the designers of the locks screen and the control center have talked, they would have known the principles described in the WWDC video and avoid all that.