Nielsen Norman Group on iOS 26 usability
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heated
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mixed
Category
tech
Key topics
iOS 26
Liquid Glass
UI/UX design
The Nielsen Norman Group's review of iOS 26's Liquid Glass design system sparks debate among HN users, with some praising its fresh look and others criticizing its usability and performance issues.
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10/12/2025, 6:38:19 PM
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Can mods change the linked article away from the thin blog post?
This current submission is nothing but a duplicate and should be flagged dead.
Anecdotally, I have used Liquid Glass since the first beta and I honestly think there are a lot of good things there. Took me a few months but I actually like it now (and I have some colleagues in there same boat as me).
I mean I had a gut feeling it would be bad for a11y when I saw it but they really twist the knife.
How can anyone write that with a straight face?
A design system like this takes at least a year, probably more like zero or three years. It’s not something you do at the last minute to “distract” from other feature teams’ failures.
I personally think Liquid Glass is promising but flawed, but there is zero chance Apple’s UX designers were given a brief “distract from the lack of AI progress”.
For all its flaws, it is very deeply thought out. This is not a rushed project on a whim.
And any time you make a massive change in design system, you’re faced with a choice of maintaining two systems (which sucks) or ripping the bandaid off and shipping when the new one is not completely ready (which sucks)
The distraction thing is just a totally unnecessary conspiracy theory. It’s sufficient to observe that LG just doesn’t seem ready.
I experimented with SwiftUI recently to get my hands in the Liquid Glass system itself, just by curiosity. Customization of the amount of blurriness is non existent at all, it is very hard to control aspects of it, super opinionated, bugs that had to be overcome with workarounds which didn't happen with previous versions of the toolkit.
To add fuel to the fire... nobody is talking about "the lack of AI" in latest macOS & iOS, and everybody seems to focus on the, overall, bad experience of Liquid Glass. So... if the strategy of serving as a distraction was true, it... worked? Not that I wanted "AI" personally (rather, I would love if they let people install any apps they want in their own phones they purchased with their own money...) but I can understand they having some pressure from certain segments of society and/or investors to have something, given the current state of affairs.
Yes - they showed their hand when Apple execs declined to appear at the annualThe Talk Show Live shortly after the host of the show publicly questioned the Apple about the failure to deliver on Apple Intelligence. They clearly did not want anyone talking to them about that, and the myriad of friendly interviews they did post with other tech folks danced beautifully around the lack of anything in Apple's AI offering.
In this case, jumping to the idea that designers were told to abruptly create something new with little time when the much more likely hypothetical scenario is that a project already deeply in progress was simply moved up from 27 to 26?
I'm not saying I believe that happened, but it's at least a viable speculation and accidentally got dismissed because of a poor interpretation of the original idea.
For this theory to work, you'd have to believe that Apple was planning to maintain two versions of the operating system and 1P apps for an extra year. I find that beggars belief, but of course it's not impossible.
In any event, it is way way too speculative to claim as an axiom.
At least they have a ton of feedback now and I think majority of people on the phone love it.
It is not that bad, but the implementation of it looks definitely complicated.
1. Liquid glass went through significant changes in every developer and public beta release between June and the full release in September. Transparency, border, light scattering changes, it was very clear that they didn't even have a strong definition internally of "how liquid" and "how glass" the liquid glass should be, and were responding in real time to reddit comments complaining about it.
2. Many aspects of the design system are still buggy, today, in October. There's some evidence that accessibility features like Increase Contrast and Button Shapes are implemented entirely differently depending on your model of iPhone [1]; they certainly do not do what the label says they should do for some users, and at the very least are implemented inconsistently, or not at all, across many apps.
3. The MacOS 26.1 developer beta further implements (welcome) changes to the design system [2]. Why weren't these ready for 26.0 GA?
4. It is expected that 2026 and 2027 are going to be a massive years for new iPhones, as we're expected the iPhone Fold to drop in 2026, then in 2027 we'll see something related to the 20th anniversary of the iPhone. Comparatively speaking, 2025 saw a new midrange iPhone model, but that's it. Coinciding a large design system change with a new phone format change (foldable) is an Apple thing to do.
If you think about Apple's timeline pre-AI, all of this kind of makes sense. A bunch of Apple Intelligence features were supposed to be done by the iOS 18 cycle, then for iOS 26 they could have continued to fill in more AI features, before a massive design refresh + new phones for iOS 27 in 2026. But they got to like iOS 18.2 before they realized that they screwed up and the AI features needed a ground-up rewrite [3] and wouldn't be ready for 18.4, let alone maybe even the 26 cycle. At that point, they realized that they went from a decent 18 month roadmap for AI stuff, to 0 months; and they needed something to make 26 interesting. So, they go to design and say "i know you thought you had 12 months until the 27 cycle, but actually, you have six, we want this in 26".
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1nx4aqe/comment/nhkor2...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSBeta/comments/1no2uuu/macos_26...
[3] this is not supposition - if you weren't following the Apple Intelligence drama of 2024, Apple has publicly stated that their AI had an initial v1 architecture that was demoed at WWDC 2024, but by late-2024 it became clear it would have to be thrown out: https://youtu.be/wCEkK1YzqBo?t=89
It was such a headache to find an app that could half-decently play a local podcast mp3 and remember the episode & playback when closed. And the apps I found that did that well were all loaded with the kind of tracking/data-logging that I am on iOS to avoid.
Makes me miss my Android devices that let me use them almost like a flash drive, without weird restrictions and USB 2.
It seems by design liquid glass is moving all over the place while I'm using it ... meaning I have to wait for the buttons to morph into whatever they want to morph into before I can tap one, or I end up tapping where the button I want just was and has now disappeared into a (...) menu.
iOS 26 has made me consider giving up the privacy benefits on Apple's ecosystem just so I can have a usable device. For now I'm on 18.7 & hope they build in public quickly. Otherwise, I'll be gleefully typing on a physical qwerty-keyboard Android device when iOS 18 becomes a friction to use.
The new MacOS on the other hand is still a bit inconsistent but it's getting there. Feels like they could've polished it more before release
That Liquid Glass thing is an absolute meme. I can’t believe they fell for it. We did it back in mid 2000s mostly because Aero was kitsch as fuck and having all those blend layers in Photoshop was phreaking cool. But 2025 with a whole OS/WM? Get the hell out I can’t believe it’s a thing.
The pace of consumer tech has stagnated so Apple is going to have a very hard time finding something truly new that’s actually useful to put in front of people. Mostly it’s a fashion item right now with people upgrading to latest phones to flex on their friends and cow workers
Also some of the examples showing blurred text behind a UI element in an area where the user wouldn't even be reading from - in previous iOS variants it would have just been a solid bar without being able to see anything. The way I take that UI decision is to show the user that there is more to see when scrolling (and to me it looks kinda cool too!).
But there are lots that need to be fixed, for sure. Tahoe annoys me with the larger rounded window corners and the UI elements in Safari seems to take way more space.
I think that's what the article refers to when it mentions lack of predictability. On iOS 17 I can scroll and use muscle memory to tap on any of the buttons down the page. But with iOS 26 I must be careful because the buttons either merge or change location and size...
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