After staring, scrolling and scrolling through Apple’s new liquid glass design language on your iPhone for a better part of a afternoon, I do not hate it. But I also feel that it needs a little more time in the kiln.

Apple Liquid glass announced For all its equipment on Monday Wwdc 2025Perhaps the most noticeable thing about it is that the app icon, tab bar, and even text magnesifier you will see when you feel the words, well, liquid-Y and glassy.

This idea seems to be such that they “swim” on things like your lockscreen wallpaper or text, “Glass” can be transcendent to make you feel what is under them. It makes sense. Initial implementation in iOS 26 Developer Beta Many of Apple’s signatures thrive and pay attention to the expansion.

But when you see them for the first time, the boy changes.

Let me show you how it dramatically replaces things. Below, on the left side is a picture of my iOS 18 lockscreen that I shared with David Pierce for the installer newsletter last month, and on the right today my lockscreen is, iOS 26 on my iPhone 16 Pro with developer beta (out now) Established.

Even in my deliberate Grassscale homescreen, I hope you can see that differences are immediately clear. Everything is transparent and shiny.

Here my homescreen is paired back with color, if you want a different way to see it. Many icons are familiar, but they are all … bubulies.

Here is the control center, which is clearly a mess right now. Transparency of liquid glass looks disorganized, and is also with my gray homescreen. I hope that under the Apple Control Center, everything makes a little more opaque so that it is easy to read at a glance.

The clock app shows a good example of better details that have changed. The lower tab bar is rounded, and when you tap on separate tabs, the selectors shift to an animation that I can best describe as a drop of water crossing across the tab. (Pressing and holding the drumlets allows you to pull it into the tab bar, which is a cool effect.) You can also see that the alarm is more oval than the button circular to turn on and off.

And here are some other tidbits that I thought would be worth sharing. There is a new form in iOS keyboard:

Settings app has a lot of space between each setting category (which is a problem that I have seen in the message list in messages):

Things under URL bar in safari will “bend” due to liquid glass design:

And the system signs look different:

First of all, I hated big changes. This surprised me. I am usually fine with UI Twix. Back during the day, I was also on board with early and worst versions of iOS 7. But after a few hours with iOS 26 developer beta, liquid glass is growing on me.

My iPhone still works as if it used to do it. I have a lot of small complaints, especially with the vacancy of the settings functions and control center. But I hope that Apple will tweek and fix a lot of big issues before the official launch of iOS 26 of this decline.