Yes, I know I'm about a year late to the Liquid Glass conversation, but I needed to wait so I could live with Apple's new design language for months before making my verdict.
If you don't already know what it is, Liquid Glass is Apple's design language and visual theme announced on June 9, 2025. It features translucent glass-like elements that render in real time and bend light in accordance to their surroundings.
Initially, I hated Liquid Glass. It was nonsensical. Why move away from the flat design language that the entire industry had been sticking with for the past 10 years? I personally hated the look of it, it made text elements harder to read and it just looked ugly.
There were (and sometimes still are) a lot of problems with Liquid Glass, the readability was terrible, the animations while, impressive were sometimes a bit odd and there was unecessary translucency. For example, one of the main elements Liquid Glass changed were the bottom navigation buttons in applications to a island with buttons next to each other. Sometimes, these islands would have poor readability for the text and the animations would be broken.
I always thought of Apple as a reliable brand that thought 100 times over before making any updates or releasing any products. Liquid Glass changed that dynamic by splitting the community and creating a half-baked initial user experience.
That being said, after using my devices (iPhone 17 and Macbook Air M2) with the iOS/macOS 26 update for a while now, Liquid Glass is bearable. It's not too obtrusive and most people won't mind it.
However, there's one app that I absolutely hate because of the update -- Apple Music on the Macbook. Apple Music looks horrendous on the Macbook now. It still looks half-baked and so much laggier than the previous version.
While Liquid Glass isn't as bad as I imagined it to be, a clear problem stood out to me -- Apple's willingness to prioritize visual novelty over usability and stability is concerning, especially for a company that has built its reputation on creating intuitive and refined products.