Liquid Glass

20th of October, 2025

Liquid Glass made everything harder to see. The rounded corners and heavy drop shadows don’t even feel futuristic. Just messy. I hated it so much on iPad that I downgraded to iOS 18. macOS Tahoe is the worst offender, so I downgraded back to Sequoia as well.

Let me be clear: I have never downgraded an Apple operating system in my life. I have no idea what’s happening at Cupertino, but the fact of the matter is that the new design language is a severe UI and UX regression.

I can’t stand heavy drop shadows. Tahoe uses them everywhere, and I still don’t get why. When shadows are subtle, they can look great, but when they’re overdone like this, they just look cheap.

There’s also rounding for the sake of rounding. Safari was so beautiful with the unified tab/url bar, and now it’s gone. Replaced with rounded tabs… for what?

Not to mention the severe UX regression. The most egregious example is Contacts.app. I’ve never seen such a blatant disregard for design and usability.

I wasn’t a fan of the iOS 7 redesign, but at least I understood what they were going for. This time, I have no idea what Apple is trying to achieve other than change for the sake of change (and/or appealing to shareholders, which I guess is working out for them).

It took until iOS 12 for Apple to peak in flat design. At this rate, I’ll probably be waiting another 4–5 years before they figure out their design again. I won’t be updating my macOS or iPadOS until then.

I’ve also experienced far more bugs than ever before. At one point, links would simply not open in Safari. I had to reboot my phone to get it to work. Sometimes tabs that I closed would still appear across all my devices. Whenever I change wallpapers, the Home Screen background would go entirely black.

But those are minor bugs. One of the worst offenders is my lock screen sometimes taking significantly longer to unlock. I would unlock via Face ID and then 10-15 seconds later, the phone unlocks. This only happens while I am on data though, not WiFi. So I’m kind of lost on how this even happens.

Another is my apps not updating. It gets stuck on “Waiting…” and nothing happens. Once again I have to reboot my phone just to get basic things working again.

One thing, quite possibly the only thing, Apple did get right is the icon design. It looks absolutely gorgeous and is a significant upgrade over the previous iterations.

Another thing I like is the lyrics pronunciation feature on Apple Music. I am able to do karaoke in both Korean and Japanese.

But that’s the extent of my praise.

Look, I’m not going to pretend that I am a great designer by any means, but what I can tell you is that I feel Apple mastered design between iOS 12 and iOS 18. Apps looked modern, clean, and consistent across platforms.

Most importantly, things were legible and the UX was fantastic. I also experienced very little bugs, but of course your mileage varies.

I reiterate once again, for the first time since I’ve owned Apple devices, I won’t be updating my iPad or Mac. Of course, if you enjoy the redesign then all the power to you. Hopefully after a few iOS iterations, the design and UX matures enough to be usable for me again.