How to disable liquid glass in iOS 26?

robman8 wrote:

It's usually just complainers that post, so I'll chime in on behalf of my 60 year old wife. She actually needs to take motion sickness pills when we take road trips,( i only say that bc some people mentioned it lol). She loves the new look, didn't want to reduce anything. Says it just seems clearer to her. So, it doesn't have to do with age, but more with people who have trouble adapting to change.

I'm only a little older than your wife (but don't suffer from motion sickness, thankfully!) and I agree with both her and you. I think there are people who always resist change and people who are more comfortable with it. It's not age, it's just a personality type.

You know nothing about visualization I’m guessing. Transparency effects ALWAYS take multiple rendering passes and therefore eat more resources - and therefore battery. Even a simple painters algorithm would require back to front sorting for every pass and be power consumptive.

You bet your bippy LG is eating more power than their past UI’s.

And one other comment about somehow LG being ‘hardwired’ and therefore not changeable: if that’s the case it’s a bad design. A good design- abstracted properly - would make turning it off and on just a simple switch.

I won’t say whether the iOS APIs are good design or not - but I will say Apple is not a big believer in backward compatibility.

bubba38n wrote:

You know nothing about visualization I’m guessing. Transparency effects ALWAYS take multiple rendering passes and therefore eat more resources - and therefore battery. Even a simple painters algorithm would require back to front sorting for every pass and be power consumptive.

You bet your bippy LG is eating more power than their past UI’s.

And one other comment about somehow LG being ‘hardwired’ and therefore not changeable: if that’s the case it’s a bad design. A good design- abstracted properly - would make turning it off and on just a simple switch.

I won’t say whether the iOS APIs are good design or not - but I will say Apple is not a big believer in backward compatibility.

I ran iOS 26 on my iPhone 16 Pro Max for 5 days, before getting my iPhone 17 Pro Max yesterday. And battery performance was completely unaffected by iOS 26 on both our iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max. If, as you say it takes more power, it certainly didn't have an affect on our phones and it's not having any affect on our new iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max. If your reason for wanting Liquid Glass removed is because of a fear of using more power, it is an unfounded fear at best.

quasar88 wrote:

Why did someone think this was a good idea? Extremely distracting!

I love how it looks and I'm someone. But you aren't addressing Apple here, since you seem to not like it, you can give feedback to Apple here --> Product Feedback - Apple

100% agree to have an option to turn this off completely. It’s terrible. I have the reduce transparency turned on, but when sleep mode is on, it seems to change it back, and the lock screen clock is not readable.

[Edited by Moderator]

They didn’t say they disliked it. They said it makes the display less accessible, and I’m having the same trouble. It doesn’t sound like you can relate to our experiences—how frustrating it is when Apple makes it harder for us to use our devices—but please know tech reviewers’ feelings and opinions about it are entirely irrelevant.

They’re just asking for the option to disable Liquid Glass, period, regardless of how you define “feature.” (And I know, this isn’t the forum for that, but please cut DanielleMarie89 and the rest of us whose devices have now become less usable some slack.) Reducing transparency doesn’t affect the flashes of light they were referring to—I’m betting that’s one of the settings they mentioned trying unsuccessfully.

You can’t ignore them? Obviously many of us found the option that most people explained to be inadequate/ineffective. All the repeat posts about reducing transparency must not annoy you, given you did the same thing. But venting your frustrations about commenters really isn’t more appropriate than people venting their frustrations about Liquid Glass.

Five_bells wrote:

You can’t ignore them? Obviously many of us found the option that most people explained to be inadequate/ineffective. All the repeat posts about reducing transparency must not annoy you, given you did the same thing. But venting your frustrations about commenters really isn’t more appropriate than people venting their frustrations about Liquid Glass.

I'm sure I could, but it's really not your place to coach me on when I can post or what I can post. This is a forum for people to ask a technical question and for other users to help them. This forum is not the place to vent. People should go somewhere else, like Reddit if they really want to vent. Rant posts, which are really venting are routinely removed by Apple Moderation. A lot of posts have been removed in this very thread. And since most people don't read past the first post, it's perfectly fine for me or anyone else to comment to them as long as we're being respectful, which I always am.

Chilll wrote:

It seems Apple’s putting what they want NOT what we want on these phones after all we are the ones buying the phones. I hope apple developers REMOVE that bs glass. Most of us hate it.

Henry Ford said "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'". As with every update including iOS 18, there are always users who say they don't like it. Nothing new here. Some just don't like change at all, and if OS 26 was the same thing as iOS 18, then there would be complaints that Apple is not innovating and their design is stagnant. Everyone has their own opinion on what they want, and not everyone is going to be happy. Maybe you are just looking for a faster horse and maybe someone else is looking for innovation. You do have the choice to update the software or not. Choose wisely, because once you do there is no going back.

Up until now I gave apple benefit of doubt. But now i am sure that ios 26 is a step backward for sure.

The UI still has accessibility issues in my opinion. The only thing good is the bouncy animation. The media player looks hedious. It used to be so sleek and felt just right in ios 18.

It is a request, please remove liquid glass

Bonniejane7 wrote:

Will try to go back to iso 18

As I am sure you are aware from reading the posts here, there is no supported method to downgrade back to iOS 18. For those that have tried the so called "workarounds" for downgrading found on the internet, it has left them with a device that no longer backs up to iCloud and resulted in other iCloud syncing issues. That is not something you would find recommended here, especially when it could lead to data loss.

I have slightly impaired sight. The downgrade to ‘liquid glass’ makes an iPhone unusable for me, even with the transparency set to the minimum allowed. There is no ‘depth’ of contrast and the screen now looks almost uniformly grey.

Seems accessibility is no longer a concern.

You have no other choice. Public beta was available for the last few weeks which is ideal for people with sight and hearing limitations which could have been reversed.

Feed back here https://apple.com/feedback

On an older iPhone 14 here. Updated my iOS to Liquid Glass and it feels like a step backwards to the Aqua days. The “bouncy” animations are completely unnecessary and serve absolutely no purpose. Despite turning on “Reduce Transparency”, it still makes things slower and harder to read.

There are also weird layout moments. For instance, the screenshot attached below shows how my headers look in Messages. Why is the initials icon overlapping the contact’s name? How do I fix that? And how do I turn off Liquid Glass COMPLETELY?

How does a $3.8 Trillion company make a decision like this?

[Edited by Moderator]