Liquid Glass seems like a big step backwards. It's new for newness' sake and hardly brings any UI improvements.
This same strategy is what brought coffee and starbucks to Japan using a ten year plan, first they had to start with coffee flavored candy to get the kids used to it, then 10 years later only then you can begin bringing in more coffee flavors, soon you have a Starbucks here and there.
iOS 6 -> iOS 7 was a huge improvement, moving towards simplicity and minimalism. Liquid Glass feels more like bloat and a lot of wasted screen estate.
It was not. Probably one of the biggest UI regressions of my lifetime on par with Windows 7 -> Windows 8. The iOS 7 design is so limiting in what it can communicate that it took Apple several major releases to make the iOS shift key's state legible to users. Arguably, they still haven't nailed it. I also find the idea that's iOS 7 is minimalistic comical, since information density dropped in most applications after the transition in favor of white space padding (necessary because the boundaries between UI and content were no longer obvious).
This problem persists to this day, probably because there is no clear way to indicate intractability in the post iOS 7 design language. For example, I was recently confused by where a setting in macOS had gone until I realized the (i) icons in some settings panels are clickable and bring up an additional setting modal (example from the Battery settings [1]). WTF!? There's no indication that this is a button at all - you either know this is a button or you don't.
And there's my perpetual bugbear - information density. Apparently it's getting worse again[2] with liquid glass, but iOS 7 was the original sin here. Removing affordances necessitated using whitespace to separate controls from each other and from content in many places because you have nothing else - but this means a dense, compact UI is often no longer possible.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/108376
[2] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/07/04/ios-26-information-densit...
Never in my life has an operating system update decreased usability as much as this step.
iOS 6 in some ways felt a bit dated at the time, sure, certainly flourishes were unnecessary… But iOS 7 was worse in every regard that mattered such as readability, discoverability, content density, visual consistency, and so on.
I’m glad we are moving on finally. But I am afraid we are moving further in the wrong direction.
I'm curious what the impact is to a11y users though—it's been a while since I had to think about it but I remember having pretty strict requirements on background/foreground font and color differences for users with suboptimal vision.