Apple just released its beta version for iOS 26 with a completely overhauled design, and… It’s bad.
I’ll admit, it was late at night and I was delirious when I saw the news. I was stoked on the idea of a bold new visual direction for Apple, a company that’s felt a little stagnant for a few years now. Last year was about Apple Intelligence, which I think over promised and under delivered, and the prior year was about the Vision Pro, the innovative product no one asked for.
So the idea of the company pushing in a new direction for their software felt to me like a captivating move I was curious to learn more about. Without giving it much thought, I downloaded it onto my daily driver iPhone, unaware of the consquences.
They changed the version numbering across all of their operating systems (iOS, macOS, watchOS, etc.) to all align as version 26. Their big sales pitch around the new look is this Liquid Glass motif, a transluscent digital material that refracts whatever’s behind it on screen, for an experience they claim is “more expressive and delightful”. Every single application and user interface incorporates this Liquid Glass, from notifications, browsing in Safari, Photos… Everything.
In Theory
I like that they are taking a bold artistic direction that’s going to turn some heads and be sure to bring some controversy. Apple devices, particularly the iPhone, are widespread, especially here in the US, so the decisions they make, even the very small details, will impact millions of users’ experiences every day. That kind of impact is cool, and not “playing it safe” on this kind of platform feels closer to the Apple of the past, the Steve Jobs and Jony Ive Apple. Bringing more beauty, more aesthetics, more playfulness to something as mundane as a smartphone’s OS seems like my cup of tea. So what went wrong?
In Practice
Well, the redesign sucks. Let me explain. I’m not against big, sweeping changes from Apple. I wasn’t even complaining about what they did to the iOS 18 Photos app last year. I could find the novelty and utility in its messiness.
But this time, Apple took a novel idea like creating a glassy background material and went ahead and smeared it on every component that might have other visual content behind it. It’s reminiscent of the Frutiger Aero design trend from Windows Vista and other popular corporate software of the time, characterized by organic themes like glass and air. This puts the glass right in front of you, front and center. And I think that it misses the mark entirely.
I’ve actively looked at my phone less since updating, partially because it’s just so distracting and unpleasant to read anything. All the buttons have been rearranged, and everything feels unfamiliar. I’m a tech savvy user as well, so I can’t imagine what my great aunt would think trying to use it all.
Accessibility Issues
The first big thing I noticed as soon as I booted up the new iOS was that accessibility immediately went out the window. Everything is now lower contrast and harder to read.
Notifications on the home screen are far lighter and more transparent. The text is now a second class citizen, set against the colors and details of the wallpaper shining through, between every letter and line.
There’s novel light physics at play here. As you scroll the notifications, the light of the background image bends around the edges of the notification, replicating the look of glass. Maybe I’d be mezmerized and delighted by it, if it weren’t so distracting from doing what the purpose of the component is, which is reading the damn notifications.
Form Over Function
I also noticed a trend of aesthetically pleasing but dysfunctional button placement across the apps.
In Safari, if I want to make a new tab, I need to open a hamburger menu now. If I want to see all tabs, I need to hit that hamburger menu. If I want to make a new tab from all tabs, the new tab button is now on the very top left of my screen. Apple, what’s going on here?
There’s a slick animation on the bottom navbar during scrolling. You can tell they put a lot of thought into how it looks, and it’s honestly quite cool. But did nobody browse the internet on this thing for more than a couple minutes while testing it all?
Same goes for the Photos app. So much useful stuff got moved from the bottom to the top of the screen, likely in service of design aesthetics. I really don’t want to have to reach to the very top left of my giant iPhone 14 Pro Max to use menu options that I frequently need.
Battery Life
One of the worst offences of downloading iOS 26 Beta is the degradation of battery life.
I remember when I bought my iPhone back in 2022. I was amazed at the battery life on the thing. I could go a couple of days without having to charge. It’s been a silent workhorse ever since. No matter how addicted to my screen I was, I could count on the battery to last, even years later, as the battery capacity degraded. On iOS 18, it was still working quite reliably.
But iOS 26 is different. Apple decided that for every possible UI component, raycasting would be needed, and it’s pushing my phone to the brink of death. If having glassy elements all over my screen means sacrificing the peace of mind of having a phone that will be alive to make an emergency call, I don’t want it.
It might not even be the Liquid Glass killing all the performance, either. There might be something more sinister lurking under the hood. I was browsing Instagram and YouTube this morning for about an hour, and lost nearly a quarter of my battery from it. This is unheard of for me, as just a day prior it might have only looked like 10% degradation from such a task.
Using FaceTime? Forget about it. I tried FaceTiming my girlfriend last night and felt the phone heat up in my hand, watching the number on the battery symbol shrink by the minute. Now I’m going to be stressed when going out and about with my phone, which wasn’t an issue for me before. It makes me wonder if Apple is purposely bricking battery life on devices again to drive new iPhone sales next quarter.
Apple Intelligence
My experience with Apple Intelligence is limited, and I like it that way. Subtle quality of life improvements and fun features are appreciated, and I’ve enjoyed making stickers and grabbing subjects from the foregrounds of photos with a finger press.
I’ve enjoyed seeing my friends and family’s faces grouped and classified into albums for browsing and sharing. It’s cool to see when it identifies a certain kind of plant or animal in a photo’s metadata. Highlighting text from photos and screenshots can also be useful. I think their AI does an amazing job at making photos look incredible in a variety of different lighting and aperture scenarios.
I use Siri for three things: turning my smart lights in my room on and off, scheduling alarms, and adding reminders. Beyond that, it’s been completely useless to my daily life. Sometimes it’s not even great at achieving those three tasks.
As you can tell, a lot of the positives (almost all of them) have to do with photos. But’s that’s sort of where the experience ends for me.
Whenever I see new Apple Intelligence features, I shrug and think, that’s novel, but I’m probably not going to use it. I’d love for Apple to prove me wrong and continue to roll out delightful little features like those I mentioned, but I really don’t see a need for pose detection on FaceTime, Genmoji, or the like.
The AI hype wave has meant softare companies devoting a lot of resources and time to shoehorning in the tech in every corner of their software, and frankly, I don’t think it’s mostly been positive. Apple has been a weird player in this game for some time now.
I liked the idea that AI wasn’t their priority. It felt rebellious even. But with each new software update it seems like they are pushing harder and harder for that angle.
Bugs in Beta
iOS 26 is in beta, so bugs are to be expected, but boy did I run into a lot of bugs with this thing. It’s not like I’ve written them all down for later, so don’t expect a comprehensive list from me, but this has been impactful to my experience.
One thing that stood out to me the most is that, while watching videos in Safari, if you rotate the screen orientation, the video is completely off center. You have to double tap the video to center it after the rotation happens, which is extremely annoying. How did they break such a mature feature like this?
And all of the fancy motion happening… It often breaks. Apple decided to sacrifice simplicity for complexity in how visual elements move around the screen and adapt to context, and it’s not all smooth yet. Sometimes things get stuck and glitch wildly, or disappear completely. It makes for an unusable experience in some apps. All I can do is hope for them to iron out these issues before the official release.
Some Positive Feedback
One big positive to the update was something that wasn’t mentioned a lot in the press releases. The keyboard now gives haptic feedback while typing, which feels amazing. If I could keep one feature from this update, it’s most certainly the updated keyboard. I didn’t realize I’d enjoy the light vibrations against my fingers when tapping each letter, but I do.
I also like that messages are now grouped by known and unknown senders, which filters out a lot of the clutter from my inbox. Same goes for how phone calls are handled. These things have proven useful so far and I like them.
I’m sure as I play with it more, I might discover some more improvements. I don’t want to bag on their engineers and designers for everything, there’s always a silver lining. But it is more fun to write a critique then it is to congratulate a giant corporation like Apple. They’re not really the underdog anymore. And you probably wouldn’t want to read a post about how amazing Apple is.
Read the Room
Once again, Apple delivered something that nobody asked for, nobody wanted, and certainly nobody needed. This bold redesign makes less and less sense the longer I use it. Was it to differentiate themselves from a market where Android OS is converging on their prior design language? Did they really think that this gimmick would grealy improve user experience? Have they gone insane?
I don’t know. I don’t work at Apple, nor do I have any context to what their leadership was thinking internally. But I am an Apple user, across all my professional and personal devices. I have been for almost my entire life. I use Logic Pro to make music, and basically live inside a terminal running on macOS for software development. And they let me down a lot with this one.
If you were thinking about installing the beta, my advice would be to hold off for now. Let Apple get their act together and tighten it up first. I’m not even sure I can revert as of right now, as I’ve read that I’d lose a lot of data in doing so.
For us designers and software developers, this is a great reminder to prioritze function over form, stability over novelty, perform adequate user testing, and above all else, read the room.