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Comment by illiac786 | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, in iOS 18, suppressing transparency (there’s a setting for it) makes performance worse, not better. The UI lags significantly more with transparency disabled. I expect it will be the same with iOS 26: there will be setting to reduce the transparency (which I find highly distracting) but it will make performance actually worse…

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Thanks for this insight. It's very counter intuitive. Normally transparency is additional work for a GPU.

I had "Reduce Transparency" check-box in settings turned on because I distaste semit-transparent interfaces. Was not noticing performance problems except one application - Ogranics Maps which were unusably slow after switching to another app and returning to maps so I had to restart it freqently (swipe up). I was thinking that the problem is with Ogranics Maps code.

After seeing this comment re-enabled transparency (iOS default) and Ogranics Maps working fast even if I switch between Organic Maps and other apps!

It potentially only applies to older iPhones, I have an iPhone 12, what’s yours?

Also reported here for example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1d2ncvu/if_your_old...

I use iPhone SE 3rd gen, accordig to wikipedia it's on A15 Bionic SoC, newer than in iPhone 12 (A14 Bionic) but still far from the latest.

Did suppressing transparency also turn on processor throttling or something too? Like putting the device in a power saver mode?

My phone is always in power save mode. Re-enabling transparency actually made the UI less jerky. It was mostly the keyboard that became unresponsive, I could type 15-20 letters while it froze and it would then „catch up“.

Also reported here for example: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255911835

Re-enabling transparency improved this a lot, also keyboard still hangs a bit from time to time. I’m always in power save mode, on an iPhone 12, running iOS18.

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