Nielsen Norman Group on iOS 26 usability | Hacker News Reader

Nielsen Norman Group on iOS 26 usability

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Actual Nielsen Norman Group article here https://www.nngroup.com/articles/liquid-glass/

Can mods change the linked article away from the thin blog post?

The original article was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45544044

1 day ago, 511 comments

This current submission is nothing but a duplicate and should be flagged dead.

The original article is absolutely damning of the UI. It is eye opening (no pun intended).

I mean I had a gut feeling it would be bad for a11y when I saw it but they really twist the knife.

Author here. I was also surprised to see this getting a bunch of HN traffic suddenly. I guess the Liquid Glass hate is pretty strong when a dashed-off blog post about a real blog post can randomly do numbers! Heartened to see that others are annoyed by this design as well, though. Hopefully Apple will do something about it, but I'm not holding my breath.

I don’t know if you remember iOS 7, it was a catastrophe. Designs evolve on Apple platforms, usually in the correct direction.

Anecdotally, I have used Liquid Glass since the first beta and I honestly think there are a lot of good things there. Took me a few months but I actually like it now (and I have some colleagues in there same boat as me).

> the theory that Liquid Glass is an attempt to distract customers from iOS 26’s lack of long-promised AI features

How can anyone write that with a straight face?

A design system like this takes at least a year, probably more like zero or three years. It’s not something you do at the last minute to “distract” from other feature teams’ failures.

I personally think Liquid Glass is promising but flawed, but there is zero chance Apple’s UX designers were given a brief “distract from the lack of AI progress”.

For all its flaws, it is very deeply thought out. This is not a rushed project on a whim.

I don't think anyone is alleging they went to the UX designers and told them they needed some form of distraction. What is plausible is that the UX designers were working on one or more possibilities for a major redesign and apple executives decided to push one out even though it might not have been good enough/ready because they needed something splashy in the absence of their promised AI features.

> they needed something splashy in the absence of their promised AI features

Yes - they showed their hand when Apple execs declined to appear at the annualThe Talk Show Live shortly after the host of the show publicly questioned the Apple about the failure to deliver on Apple Intelligence. They clearly did not want anyone talking to them about that, and the myriad of friendly interviews they did post with other tech folks danced beautifully around the lack of anything in Apple's AI offering.

Most UI designers will churn for the sake of churn, no ulterior motive needed.

It would still be a year or more before launch. They had to have the toolkit ready for internal apps way back when.

And any time you make a massive change in design system, you’re faced with a choice of maintaining two systems (which sucks) or ripping the bandaid off and shipping when the new one is not completely ready (which sucks)

The distraction thing is just a totally unnecessary conspiracy theory. It’s sufficient to observe that LG just doesn’t seem ready.

The whole system and apps are half-baked overall, filled with bugs, and obvious UI/UX mistakes. I do believe [speculation warning] there's plausibility in the idea it has been pushed by C suite, even against the advice from designers and engineers at Apple. It is inconceivable to me as a designer myself that they let so many amateurish readability and usability flaws, all over the place across the entire system.

I experimented with SwiftUI recently to get my hands in the Liquid Glass system itself, just by curiosity. Customization of the amount of blurriness is non existent at all, it is very hard to control aspects of it, super opinionated, bugs that had to be overcome with workarounds which didn't happen with previous versions of the toolkit.

To add fuel to the fire... nobody is talking about "the lack of AI" in latest macOS & iOS, and everybody seems to focus on the, overall, bad experience of Liquid Glass. So... if the strategy of serving as a distraction was true, it... worked? Not that I wanted "AI" personally (rather, I would love if they let people install any apps they want in their own phones they purchased with their own money...) but I can understand they having some pressure from certain segments of society and/or investors to have something, given the current state of affairs.

Not as in “designed to distract” but rather “rushed half baked to distract instead of waiting until it’s ready”.

Judging by the poor implementation, the "last minute job" theory is not all that unreasonable

Is there a term for this accidental creation of a straw man where you may not have intended it but you quickly and confidently respond based on a shallow and poorly thought out interpretation of something?

In this case, jumping to the idea that designers were told to abruptly create something new with little time when the much more likely hypothetical scenario is that a project already deeply in progress was simply moved up from 27 to 26?

I'm not saying I believe that happened, but it's at least a viable speculation and accidentally got dismissed because of a poor interpretation of the original idea.

If the project can be released a year earlier it absolutely should be released a year earlier.

At least they have a ton of feedback now and I think majority of people on the phone love it.

It is not that bad, but the implementation of it looks definitely complicated.

Eh, it's slightly viable, but unlikely. LG is too far along to be something they wanted to maintain as a fork for an entire year. Keeping apps working with two totally different design systems is a nightmare.

For this theory to work, you'd have to believe that Apple was planning to maintain two versions of the operating system and 1P apps for an extra year. I find that beggars belief, but of course it's not impossible.

In any event, it is way way too speculative to claim as an axiom.

IMO: There's a ton of circumstantial evidence Liquid Glass was supposed to be a 2026 feature, but at some point between 2024-2025 they accelerated it for a 2025 release. Stating that it was because of the Apple Intelligence disaster of 2024 totally fits in the timeline.

1. Liquid glass went through significant changes in every developer and public beta release between June and the full release in September. Transparency, border, light scattering changes, it was very clear that they didn't even have a strong definition internally of "how liquid" and "how glass" the liquid glass should be, and were responding in real time to reddit comments complaining about it.

2. Many aspects of the design system are still buggy, today, in October. There's some evidence that accessibility features like Increase Contrast and Button Shapes are implemented entirely differently depending on your model of iPhone [1]; they certainly do not do what the label says they should do for some users, and at the very least are implemented inconsistently, or not at all, across many apps.

3. The MacOS 26.1 developer beta further implements (welcome) changes to the design system [2]. Why weren't these ready for 26.0 GA?

4. It is expected that 2026 and 2027 are going to be a massive years for new iPhones, as we're expected the iPhone Fold to drop in 2026, then in 2027 we'll see something related to the 20th anniversary of the iPhone. Comparatively speaking, 2025 saw a new midrange iPhone model, but that's it. Coinciding a large design system change with a new phone format change (foldable) is an Apple thing to do.

If you think about Apple's timeline pre-AI, all of this kind of makes sense. A bunch of Apple Intelligence features were supposed to be done by the iOS 18 cycle, then for iOS 26 they could have continued to fill in more AI features, before a massive design refresh + new phones for iOS 27 in 2026. But they got to like iOS 18.2 before they realized that they screwed up and the AI features needed a ground-up rewrite [3] and wouldn't be ready for 18.4, let alone maybe even the 26 cycle. At that point, they realized that they went from a decent 18 month roadmap for AI stuff, to 0 months; and they needed something to make 26 interesting. So, they go to design and say "i know you thought you had 12 months until the 27 cycle, but actually, you have six, we want this in 26".

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1nx4aqe/comment/nhkor2...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSBeta/comments/1no2uuu/macos_26...

[3] this is not supposition - if you weren't following the Apple Intelligence drama of 2024, Apple has publicly stated that their AI had an initial v1 architecture that was demoed at WWDC 2024, but by late-2024 it became clear it would have to be thrown out: https://youtu.be/wCEkK1YzqBo?t=89

My biggest issue with iOS 26 is not the UI (it’s subpar compared to prior work), but the fact that it drains my battery 2x faster than before and I’m with an iPhone 16 Pro. That’s unacceptable performance degradation on a 1-year old phone.

I mean, they need arguments to make their user base buy a new iPhone. Does a thinner, smaller battery make you buy it? No. Does Apple Intelligence make you buy it? Maybe, but it won't be released in the next 100 years. Does a very slightly better camera make you buy it? No. What if we make your current phone slower and use up more storage of it with every update, would that make you upgrade?

To be honest, no. It would just disappoint me as a customer and make me switch to a much cheaper Android.

There used to be NO way I'd make the jump to Android, but the iOS 26 lewk combined with a recent frustration of trying to add some podcasts to my iPhone from my hard drive (the show isn't online anymore).

It was such a headache to find an app that could half-decently play a local podcast mp3 and remember the episode & playback when closed. And the apps I found that did that well were all loaded with the kind of tracking/data-logging that I am on iOS to avoid.

Makes me miss my Android devices that let me use them almost like a flash drive, without weird restrictions and USB 2.

I actually like it. There are glitches and various issues, but it still feels solid and something that Apple would do, not Microsoft with Vista. Looks like something funky and a breath of fresh air compared with all the boring flat designs that took over everything.

Yeah I love it

The new MacOS on the other hand is still a bit inconsistent but it's getting there. Feels like they could've polished it more before release

Do the people designing these interfaces not have parents/grandparents? How anyone over 50 can even see well enough to use many of these interfaces is a mystery to me. Increasing the text size usually makes the interface even more difficult to use.

My main issue with iOS 26 is too much (unnecessary) animation and the fact that as you scroll, the buttons at the bottom of the page change.

I think that's what the article refers to when it mentions lack of predictability. On iOS 17 I can scroll and use muscle memory to tap on any of the buttons down the page. But with iOS 26 I must be careful because the buttons either merge or change location and size...

Apple is split between being this poppy, fresh company for the creative, as they were with their skeuomorphic designs and a more security savvy crowd with their new marketing bent towards organizations now that windows is less than reliable. Perhaps this was the right move for their consumer-bent OSses like ipados or ios, but there's a reason most enterprise companies used windows 7/vista with the boxy classic themes.

They will have a seriously hard time coming up with something new. The last thing they did was the iPhone and since then their output has stagnated. Yes, M series, yes Metal yes that dumb AR headset. They’re playing catch up to everything everyone else is doing and it’s not going well.

That Liquid Glass thing is an absolute meme. I can’t believe they fell for it. We did it back in mid 2000s mostly because Aero was kitsch as fuck and having all those blend layers in Photoshop was phreaking cool. But 2025 with a whole OS/WM? Get the hell out I can’t believe it’s a thing.

The pace of consumer tech has stagnated so Apple is going to have a very hard time finding something truly new that’s actually useful to put in front of people. Mostly it’s a fashion item right now with people upgrading to latest phones to flex on their friends and cow workers

you need an expert to write that? Whoever thought: "lets take away things that work and are easy, and replace them with things that look nice" I hope they burn in hell. It's such a downgrade without any real value. Its not faster, its not more intuitive, its just more shiny

As someone that loves Liquid Glass but acknowledges there are a few issues with it, I had to take the NN Group article a bit less seriously when one of their examples was the iMessage screenshot with the busy background. That would have looked illegible in any UI design system!

Also some of the examples showing blurred text behind a UI element in an area where the user wouldn't even be reading from - in previous iOS variants it would have just been a solid bar without being able to see anything. The way I take that UI decision is to show the user that there is more to see when scrolling (and to me it looks kinda cool too!).

But there are lots that need to be fixed, for sure. Tahoe annoys me with the larger rounded window corners and the UI elements in Safari seems to take way more space.

I think honestly they are just building in public. All those issues are with bugs in the current implementation not with the Liquid Glass "design language" itself. (OK wow it autocapitalizes it lol). I mean is it slow? Yes, currently. Does it have many bugs and glitches? Yes, currently. But does it look fresh? It does thats why Xiaomi etc are already copying it. Why should the biggest company have to build in public? Because it's how it performs in a mimetic environment not just with beta testers. Instead this author just assumes they ship the initial version completely bug free. I see so many people complaining, but I'm sure they will improve the reduce transparency mode quite a bit, maybe make the glass look blurry without the underlying reflections and in a couple years nobody is gonna want the old thing back, just like how all IOS7 complaints slowly faded.

Do you think they will change the behavior of buttons morphing as you scroll an app's content?

It seems by design liquid glass is moving all over the place while I'm using it ... meaning I have to wait for the buttons to morph into whatever they want to morph into before I can tap one, or I end up tapping where the button I want just was and has now disappeared into a (...) menu.

iOS 26 has made me consider giving up the privacy benefits on Apple's ecosystem just so I can have a usable device. For now I'm on 18.7 & hope they build in public quickly. Otherwise, I'll be gleefully typing on a physical qwerty-keyboard Android device when iOS 18 becomes a friction to use.

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