Upgraded my iPad to the iOS 26 beta, just to see what this fuss over Liquid Glass was about. First impressions after about 30 minutes of use: hmm. Certain aspects about it do look nice — I like the effect it has on the launch bar and when moving an empty app folder over the changing background. And I can see what they’re trying to achieve. But there are some aspects I’m not too sure about.

The glassy lettering style for the time on the lock screen makes it harder to see at a glance. Likewise for notifications with the glassy background. Both give the impression of something being there as long as you look carefully at the edges. It reminds me of that episode of Seinfield where Kramer found a windscreen on the road and thought to make a coffee table from it, with the other characters expressing skepticism that they wouldn’t be able to see it (“you’ll sense it”).

Another thing I’m not to sure about: the lack of definitive edges between colours in app icons, like the Photos app. They now make them look a little blurry from a distance, at least to my eyes:

Auto-generated description: Six colorful app icons on a red-orange background represent Home, Photos, Camera, Contacts, Maps, and Find My.

Might be okay if all the icons were like this, but at this stage, when you compare it to an icon that has not been updated, like Obsidians, it just looks weird:

Auto-generated description: A row of application icons is displayed on a device's dock, including Safari, Photos, Settings, and several others.

I don’t like what they’ve done to Safari either. The header is now taller and the address bar is now shorter. Shortening the address bar actually bothers me quite a bit. I don’t know why they had to do that, it’s not like they’re short on space. Granted I’m using Safari in landscape mode, which is how I generally use my iPad, but it’s not like the address needs to be the same size in both orientations. And it’s not like they don’t know how to do this: they did it in iOS 18.

Oh, and ahh, yeah: contrast bugs in Safari’s header are still a thing:

Auto-generated description: A dark-themed webpage displays the name Mandaris with navigation buttons like About, Links, Photos, and Archive.

Finally, popup menus in Safari: when you bring them up for a picker, the menu shoots off from the button to the right and then resizes to left to reveal the options. This feels buggy to me, or at least I hope it’s a bug as it’s a transition animation that I don’t care for. For something that I expect to just drop down, there’s a lot of unnecessary moving about.

So yeah, first impressions are kinda mixed. I can now understand what the Apple pundits I listen to are talking about. And I do get the sense they may have bitten off more than they can chew here. Hopefully they can improve on this before the general release.