[Content warning: a lot of complaining]
So, I finally gave in and started updating my iDevices to Liquid Ass, after the latest big vulnerability story with the DarkSword hacking toolkit leak – starting with my iPad for now. (I'm still pissed at Apple for withholding the security updates for iOS 18 for devices that support iOS 26 – they've released security patches from 18.7.3 to 18.7.7, but they're only available for iPhone XR & XS… if you have e.g. an iPhone SE3, you can't install it, even though they have everything implemented and packaged. If they really cared about users' security, they would just make it available like they do with macOS updates 😒)
(Update 1.04.2026: they've actually released 18.7.7 for all devices now! For real 😲)
Some random first impressions:
The "liquidness" feels a bit unevenly distributed – it kinda feels like different parts of the OS use slightly different design. Some parts are super transparent & glassy (the notifications slide-over screen, the app folders on Home, a few specific apps like Signal have a very glassy bottom tab bar), while many others have a very white design with white buttons with shadows, and very little transparency (e.g. Stocks, Notes, Files, Mail). In other places (e.g. Maps sidebar) there are blurred translucent backgrounds which I think are similar to what we had before. I'm guessing there might be more of that glassy toolbar on the iPhone instead of the top tap bars. (Don't get me wrong, I'm *happy* that there isn't more glass there, but it still feels a bit inconsistent.)
I'm struggling to find any places where the "Liquid Glass: clear / tinted" setting makes any difference whatsoever, apart from I think the notification bubbles on notifications screen / lock screen… I think it's an extremely light effect.
App icons look mostly fine, though some seem very blurry for no good reason, this is also inconsistent. E.g. the Clock app icon is sharp and lovely, Weather looks nice, while Photos is very blurred. It's generally worse for icons which are in the Dock and so are slightly resized from the original. This might be just my eyes, but even if so, this is still somewhat of an accessibility issue then.
There are too many animations, at least some parts feel too noisy and distracting in general. After the first evening with it, I felt tired and overstimulated. The absolute worst is the popover menu opening animation – it's just over the top, like someone wanted to show off their animation skills…
I feel like this is worse in "laptop mode" with Magic Keyboard, because as you're moving the cursor across the screen over buttons and other controls, everything feels just much more wobbly and dynamic than before.
There's the accessibility setting "Reduce motion", but it's more like "disable motion"… because it e.g. changes the app opening animation and popover animations from a slide-in to a fade-in, which looks very different. I wish there was a way to just reduce the motion, to make the craziest animations more toned down, while still keeping various usual slide-ins.
On lists in some places, especially the whole Settings app, there's so much more padding and the text is larger (even at a pretty small text size setting), that where it could fit 11 items on iOS 18, now it fits only 9. Why do they want me to see less things on the screen at the same time? It's like they want me to buy the larger 13" iPad instead… But it's nothing new with them really – it's been the same with iPhones, with larger and larger iPhones being released, and then iOS changed to have more spacing, and older smaller iPhones suddenly fitting so much less on the screen.
Also, why is everything sooo round?… like, they increased the border-radius to a max possible setting. Which also contributes to the wasted space.
I'm not a fan of how the tabs and the navigation bar looks in Safari…
For some reason, scrolling the grid of open tab previews in Safari (on the "Show all tabs" screen) has like 15 fps 🤨 it's really choppy. Other places are mostly ok, it could be better (some places feel less fluent than before the update), but in general the performance isn't bad.
Third party apps from larger companies that do some custom UI (Google Maps, DuckDuckGo, Airbnb, Dropbox) now stand out a lot, negatively, because you can see immediately that e.g. the popovers don't look like in Apple's apps 🙃
The windows switching button at the top in the center is gone, and I think there's no way to access the UI for switching between an app's windows if you're in the "full screen apps" mode (and not "windowed apps" mode)? That kinda sucks. Also the new Mac-like menu bar doesn't seem to be showing at all if you're in that mode. And the iPad shortcuts popup that used to appear when you hold Cmd is completely gone I think.
Overall, this is much less drastic change than I expected, and I think much smaller shock than iOS 7 was, coming from the skeuomorphic iOS 6. And there haven't been any big changes in terms of layout, just the look & feel of specific controls – the pieces for this had been laid out already for the past few versions, e.g. the floating top tab bar that turns into a sidebar and back, which appeared in iOS 18 or 17, or menu popovers which came a bit earlier.
That said, I'm worried because I'm just looking at buying a new iPad for my mom, who has been using an iPad Air 2 (now at iOS 15) for the past ~10 years as her main computer, I wanted to buy her the new Air M4 for her birthday soon, and I really don't know how she's gonna react to this design, and if she won't resist the switch.
I know they're not gonna roll it all back, but I really hope they fix all the various issues and somehow improve / tweak / tone down / make configurable various effects in iOS 27…
