The evidence suggests this isn't AR prep at all. I watched Apple's 20-minute design presentation, and their design team makes the same point repeatedly: Liquid Glass has very narrow guidelines and specific constraints.
Here's the actual design problem Apple solved. In content apps, you have a fundamental trade-off: you have a few controls that need to be instantly accessible, but you don't want them visually distracting from the content. Users are there to consume videos, photos, articles - not to stare at your buttons. But the controls still have to be there when needed.
Before Liquid Glass, your least intrusive option was backdrop blur or translucent pastel dimming overlays. Apple asked: can we make controls even less distracting? Liquid Glass lets you thread this needle even better. It's a pretty neat trick for solving this specific constraint.
So you'll feel like you're seeing Liquid Glass "everywhere" not because Apple applied it broadly, but because of selection bias. The narrow use case Apple designed this for just happens to be where you spend 80% of your phone time: videos, photos, reading messages. You're information processing, not authoring.
Apple's actual guidelines are clear: only a few controls visible at once, infrequent access pattern, only on top of rich content. The criticism assumes they're redesigning everything when they explicitly documented the opposite. People are reacting to marketing tone instead of reading what Apple's design team actually built.
> Users are there to consume videos, photos, articles - not to stare at your buttons
But if I want to use the buttons, that necessitates that I see the buttons first in order to use them. If I don't need to see a button, the button probably shouldn't be there at all.
It's not the worst design I've ever seen, but it does feel like they've swung a bit too far in the "users want to focus on the content" direction. The tools to interact with the content are also an important part of the interface and if you can't see them clearly they're not very usable.
Not necessarily. Given how most mobile UX design operates today, in most apps there’ll just be a single glassy hamburger button that opens a (much more legible) menu. You don’t need to read a hamburger button; you just need to know it’s there as a tap target.
Honestly, I think the iPadOS enablement of toplevel app menus + addition of multi-key in-app-menu-action completions to macOS Spotlight, is presaging an iPhone that has a physical “hamburger button” that opens the app’s menu [and pops open the keyboard, to quick-access menu items by key.] Then there’ll be no need for an on-screen hamburger button at all, other than as a fallback for old iPhones that don’t have the hardware button.
I don’t think control center actually uses the liquid glass elements. They don’t respond to accessibility options like reduce transparency, for one thing.
> their design team makes the same point repeatedly: Liquid Glass has very narrow guidelines and specific constraints
Often, UX design rhetoric floats way beyond reality. For now, a lot of Liquid Glass is grossly applied. It's only dev beta 1, so it's likely it'll improve over time... especially if they launch an AR product.
I dunno, I find the blur more visually distracting than a hard stop.
I would rather borders and color contrast to create visual separation anyway. That approach takes up less space. White space takes makes your UI less dense, but blur is even worse.
Either way… how does that relate to my keyboard being transparent? I don’t need to see a completely illegible blur of the colors behind my keyboard.
I just turned on the “reduce transparency” setting and it’s much better.
I'm not necessarily a fan of Apple's design, but I want to add that when you have floating header bars it cuts down screen real estate and makes the UI feel more claustrophobic. Making it semi-transparent helps that significantly.
There are usability reasons for this too - for instance, even if it's blurred, a hint of what content is behind the bar helps the user know when they've neared some new content or when to stop scrolling, or whether there's more content above/below the unobscured viewport.
The evidence suggests this isn't AR prep at all. I watched Apple's 20-minute design presentation, and their design team makes the same point repeatedly: Liquid Glass has very narrow guidelines and specific constraints.
Here's the actual design problem Apple solved. In content apps, you have a fundamental trade-off: you have a few controls that need to be instantly accessible, but you don't want them visually distracting from the content. Users are there to consume videos, photos, articles - not to stare at your buttons. But the controls still have to be there when needed.
Before Liquid Glass, your least intrusive option was backdrop blur or translucent pastel dimming overlays. Apple asked: can we make controls even less distracting? Liquid Glass lets you thread this needle even better. It's a pretty neat trick for solving this specific constraint.
So you'll feel like you're seeing Liquid Glass "everywhere" not because Apple applied it broadly, but because of selection bias. The narrow use case Apple designed this for just happens to be where you spend 80% of your phone time: videos, photos, reading messages. You're information processing, not authoring.
Apple's actual guidelines are clear: only a few controls visible at once, infrequent access pattern, only on top of rich content. The criticism assumes they're redesigning everything when they explicitly documented the opposite. People are reacting to marketing tone instead of reading what Apple's design team actually built.
[1] https://peoplesgrocers.com/en/writing/liquid-glass-explained