I have yet to see an app get better with Liquid Glass. I’ve seen plenty get worse, like the Kroger app which is now even worse of an app than when I reviewed it a couple years ago. I’m considering doing another review (that no one asked for) just to call out how stupid their Liquid Glass implementation is. In that case, it’s not just Kroger’s incompetence, the design language that Apple has forced on people just sucks.
When I first started writing cross-platform apps I was concerned about not matching the OS and having a design that didn’t “jive” with other apps. I have long since realized this was the best decision I could have made. I’m not beholden to either OS’s whims and my apps can look good no matter how much Apple screws up their UI/UX.
At a time when Apple really needs to improve developer relations they threw a massive project at their most die-hard (developer) fans (mostly as a distraction from the failed Apple “intelligence”) which resulted in the people who want to be good OS citizens to have objectively worse apps than those who said “screw it, we will do our own design”.
I’m thankful every day that Alan Dye is gone and will rejoice when Tim Cook also leaves Apple.
Bright, big, and colourful are exactly the things I want from a theming kit, though (that said, I'm a GNU/Linux head, if I have my way I'll never touch anything from Apple again).
> Their reaction? Genuine shock. They were actually concerned that developers were holding onto this position. They made it emphatically clear that Liquid Glass is absolutely moving forward, evolving, and expanding across the ecosystem.
> During the workshop, they admitted they have seen teams who are only interested in doing the bare minimum—just enough to keep their app from breaking when the new system is forced on. While that is technically allowed, it is a dangerous game of technical debt.
Apple engineers/managers seem genuinely disconnected from reality.
> Their exact warning to me was that those who don’t adopt it now “are gonna find themselves in a tough position later.”
A long time ago Apple learned that even the very best software people in industry, those top-of-class graduates from the most esteemed universities with pedigrees like "invented malloc" were stumbling at learning to program the original Macs. Before Apple acquired NeXT, reading "Inside Mac" all day and all night would not help as much as owning Steve Jasik's "THE Debugger" a fridge full of Code Red, gaining "organic knowledge" in ways that are not taught in a textbook and impossible if you are mid-career with a family. The Internet wasn't really a cheat code yet either. You couldn't hire someone to teach you such things. While this obviously was very (very!) Bad to the Sales and Marketing organizations hoping to sell more Macs (as DOS was continuing to advance into large institutions), it was awesome for the Mac bros who had that organic knowledge. But Steve returned towing NeXT and Avi's team of actual computer scientists and the deeply entrenched Boomer Mac Bros were not down with most real computer science and "sluffed off" (to become painters or whatever) like old skin. So first the mid-managers saw that shifting the platform in undocumented ways caused unproductive people to quit, then they saw that shifting the platform in documented ways caused people to quit and they thought "What an awesome way to get rid of unproductive people that you don't want around." This was great until they became so bold as to produce "The Crusty Talk" for WWDC one year and put it in terms that EEOC could begin to understand. EEOC is more about retraining the experienced workers rather than laying them off and hiring less experienced workers to learn something New. (It sounds completely crazy to people that came after the Boomers, but accept that point as fact, for now.) One can begin to imagine why that video isn't on Apple's website anymore. Back to Liquid Sluff, I mean Liquid Glass: Wasn't the whole transition to SwiftUI supposed to be about enabling the less experienced (and cheaper!) New generation (I think they are called "blue hairs" though that seems counter intuitive) to takeover from the traditional seasoned professionals building in Objective C? SwiftUI doesn't seem to have worked if they can't flip a switch at the operating system and make all the apps built with it render in "Liquid Glass" without developer intervention! Now comes the quote "they'll find themselves in a tough position" and it all makes sense...it's probably more worker sluffing.
Who cares...at this point, Apple's whole operating system is going to be reduced to an API manifest for LLMs to ingest and WWDC will probably become even more of a non-technical VC event than it already is. (Oh wait, it's. a. video.) Maybe... just maybe, someday they will start to pick winners and losers in the LLM world by messing with the API manifest just like they messed with the SDKs for the human devs over the past 50 years :D I think SEC might be faster to catch that than EEOC ever would.
> Their reaction? Genuine shock. They were actually concerned that developers were holding onto this position.
They have to be playing dumb? I mean they are interacting with someone from the outside, and they have to suspect it will end up shared somewhere. Do you want to be the developer at Apple to publicly acknowledge the shitshow your high priest designers cooked up, and spent a huge amount of resources pushing through? Most definitely not. Here is where reading body language can come in handy when speaking face to face. Maybe when they express their genuine “shock” they also smiled and winked, just plausibly enough to be taken multiple ways.
> It had to be functional, it had to meet incredibly strict styling guidelines across every single Apple platform, and most importantly, it just had to work.
Not a single person at Apple ever tried liquid shit when accomodations for the sight impaired are enabled and even without those it sucks.
I remember the first time my phone booted into the new UI. The first thing I had to do was go into Accessibility and turn on the high contrast features. I have 20/20 vision and no impairments. But I couldn’t see any of the lock screen buttons well enough to read them in front of my wallpaper anymore.
I use the "reduce motion / avoid animation" setting from accessibility, and Apple's own apps including Safari completely ignores this setting. The UI does all kinds of distracting and disturbing animations regardless of it. (I've now switched away from it for Firefox.)
It's really frustrating to experience not only non-consensual UI changes that cause cognitive load, for many people unsustainable cognitive load, but also completely steamroll over any accessibility accommodations.
I only upgraded because of the OS incessantly nagging me to do it, even when I asked it to stop checking for updates. I'm honestly not sure what to do with Apple, because Android is not any better. I wish Apple would give accessibility more than lip service.
I have yet to see an app get better with Liquid Glass. I’ve seen plenty get worse, like the Kroger app which is now even worse of an app than when I reviewed it a couple years ago. I’m considering doing another review (that no one asked for) just to call out how stupid their Liquid Glass implementation is. In that case, it’s not just Kroger’s incompetence, the design language that Apple has forced on people just sucks.
When I first started writing cross-platform apps I was concerned about not matching the OS and having a design that didn’t “jive” with other apps. I have long since realized this was the best decision I could have made. I’m not beholden to either OS’s whims and my apps can look good no matter how much Apple screws up their UI/UX.
At a time when Apple really needs to improve developer relations they threw a massive project at their most die-hard (developer) fans (mostly as a distraction from the failed Apple “intelligence”) which resulted in the people who want to be good OS citizens to have objectively worse apps than those who said “screw it, we will do our own design”.
I’m thankful every day that Alan Dye is gone and will rejoice when Tim Cook also leaves Apple.
Postponed my ios update as much as I could. Things are now brighter, bigger, full of animations, and somehow worse to read and use.
Some buttons are so big and colorful and confusing that I feel like I’m using a child’s toy, or windows xp. This is horrible.
> Postponed my ios update as much as I could.
That's what I did with iOS 6 on my iPhone 4. I never did upgrade -- it was stolen before I was forced to.
Now it sounds like iOS 26 is going the same way. Makes me glad I own no Apple product new enough to run it.
I installed a little hack on my M1 MBA to block Tahoe, and it seems to be working. I wrote a piece on how to do it for others:
https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/02/stop_tahoe_update/
Bright, big, and colourful are exactly the things I want from a theming kit, though (that said, I'm a GNU/Linux head, if I have my way I'll never touch anything from Apple again).
> Their reaction? Genuine shock. They were actually concerned that developers were holding onto this position. They made it emphatically clear that Liquid Glass is absolutely moving forward, evolving, and expanding across the ecosystem.
> During the workshop, they admitted they have seen teams who are only interested in doing the bare minimum—just enough to keep their app from breaking when the new system is forced on. While that is technically allowed, it is a dangerous game of technical debt.
Apple engineers/managers seem genuinely disconnected from reality.
Yep, this is on par with "Do you guys not have phones?" levels of disconnect.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/do-you-guys-not-have-phones
> Their exact warning to me was that those who don’t adopt it now “are gonna find themselves in a tough position later.”
A long time ago Apple learned that even the very best software people in industry, those top-of-class graduates from the most esteemed universities with pedigrees like "invented malloc" were stumbling at learning to program the original Macs. Before Apple acquired NeXT, reading "Inside Mac" all day and all night would not help as much as owning Steve Jasik's "THE Debugger" a fridge full of Code Red, gaining "organic knowledge" in ways that are not taught in a textbook and impossible if you are mid-career with a family. The Internet wasn't really a cheat code yet either. You couldn't hire someone to teach you such things. While this obviously was very (very!) Bad to the Sales and Marketing organizations hoping to sell more Macs (as DOS was continuing to advance into large institutions), it was awesome for the Mac bros who had that organic knowledge. But Steve returned towing NeXT and Avi's team of actual computer scientists and the deeply entrenched Boomer Mac Bros were not down with most real computer science and "sluffed off" (to become painters or whatever) like old skin. So first the mid-managers saw that shifting the platform in undocumented ways caused unproductive people to quit, then they saw that shifting the platform in documented ways caused people to quit and they thought "What an awesome way to get rid of unproductive people that you don't want around." This was great until they became so bold as to produce "The Crusty Talk" for WWDC one year and put it in terms that EEOC could begin to understand. EEOC is more about retraining the experienced workers rather than laying them off and hiring less experienced workers to learn something New. (It sounds completely crazy to people that came after the Boomers, but accept that point as fact, for now.) One can begin to imagine why that video isn't on Apple's website anymore. Back to Liquid Sluff, I mean Liquid Glass: Wasn't the whole transition to SwiftUI supposed to be about enabling the less experienced (and cheaper!) New generation (I think they are called "blue hairs" though that seems counter intuitive) to takeover from the traditional seasoned professionals building in Objective C? SwiftUI doesn't seem to have worked if they can't flip a switch at the operating system and make all the apps built with it render in "Liquid Glass" without developer intervention! Now comes the quote "they'll find themselves in a tough position" and it all makes sense...it's probably more worker sluffing.
Who cares...at this point, Apple's whole operating system is going to be reduced to an API manifest for LLMs to ingest and WWDC will probably become even more of a non-technical VC event than it already is. (Oh wait, it's. a. video.) Maybe... just maybe, someday they will start to pick winners and losers in the LLM world by messing with the API manifest just like they messed with the SDKs for the human devs over the past 50 years :D I think SEC might be faster to catch that than EEOC ever would.
[cue https://youtu.be/Bwwd3hmA6zs]
> Their reaction? Genuine shock. They were actually concerned that developers were holding onto this position.
They have to be playing dumb? I mean they are interacting with someone from the outside, and they have to suspect it will end up shared somewhere. Do you want to be the developer at Apple to publicly acknowledge the shitshow your high priest designers cooked up, and spent a huge amount of resources pushing through? Most definitely not. Here is where reading body language can come in handy when speaking face to face. Maybe when they express their genuine “shock” they also smiled and winked, just plausibly enough to be taken multiple ways.
> It had to be functional, it had to meet incredibly strict styling guidelines across every single Apple platform, and most importantly, it just had to work.
Not a single person at Apple ever tried liquid shit when accomodations for the sight impaired are enabled and even without those it sucks.
What a joke!
I remember the first time my phone booted into the new UI. The first thing I had to do was go into Accessibility and turn on the high contrast features. I have 20/20 vision and no impairments. But I couldn’t see any of the lock screen buttons well enough to read them in front of my wallpaper anymore.
Solid color wallpaper helps a lot with this!
I use the "reduce motion / avoid animation" setting from accessibility, and Apple's own apps including Safari completely ignores this setting. The UI does all kinds of distracting and disturbing animations regardless of it. (I've now switched away from it for Firefox.)
It's really frustrating to experience not only non-consensual UI changes that cause cognitive load, for many people unsustainable cognitive load, but also completely steamroll over any accessibility accommodations.
I only upgraded because of the OS incessantly nagging me to do it, even when I asked it to stop checking for updates. I'm honestly not sure what to do with Apple, because Android is not any better. I wish Apple would give accessibility more than lip service.