Hacker News Reader

Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com