Observations of Liquid Glass

The effect is very nice.  I don’t use it on my personal phone.  Reduce Motion inhibits the glassiness, and having motion on a phone that I actually use a lot is annoying.  I loathe waiting for an animation to finish before I am Permitted to interact with anything.

Clear icons aren’t… bad.  Unless they’re dark.  Then they’re not clear anymore, which makes me wonder if people in Cupertino actually understand their own language.  I don’t use clear icons on my personal phone, because I like the auto-dark mode.  Ironically, between color filters to greyscale (to make the phone less attention-hogging) and Reduce Motion, normal icons are not that far off their clear counterparts.

On the impersonal phone, clear icons and Liquid Glass look pretty nice together, at least on the iOS 26 wallpapers.  I have them set to “always light” due to their lackluster dark variants, but they look fine that way when the rest of the phone is in dark mode.

Opening an app brings up a solid-background splash screen, and app.  There’s so much 💖new💖 look, until it is touched, and then the glass disappears.  A subconscious wrongness suffuses it.  Apple took it halfway.  They Microsoft’ed it.  I can use it, but it keeps me wondering… why?

Update: [2025-11-15] I experimentally turned off Reduce Motion on my personal phone, and sometimes, the motion gets really confused.  This makes everything jittery with the phone held as still as humanly possible, like it’s had three cups of coffee.  It looks like the effect that I saw sometimes with Reduce Motion on, where the line above the dock would flicker, but with everything at once.

I also found out that icon customization is somehow tied to the screen layout or focus.  I made icons clear in Sleep mode, and they remained non-clear outside of Sleep.  I like this result, but the UI doesn’t make it clear where the setting applies.

Sometimes, the Apple apps in my sleep focus screen turn into empty-app indicators.  No reminders, notes, or music for the night!  But third-party apps are fine.  I cannot fathom how the first-party systems could exhibit such poor results.

I can use it, but there are so many rough edges, I keep wondering… why?