I have some family members who updated this week so I have finally seen it in person (I don’t have any spare Apple devices to install beta software on), but I’ve also been watching videos of the various betas on YouTube over the past few months. For sure there have definitely been moments where I’ve seen like, an update in one of the betas where my reaction is “oh good they made that more readable than in the last beta” and then I looked at the same screen on my phone not on the beta and the consistency of the legibility is just night and day. Liquid glass can be presented in specific scenarios that look good, great even. It’s a very neat shader pack. Very “rule of cool”. Unfortunately, I prefer “rule of I can always read the words” and there are plenty of scenarios where liquid glass falls apart, even in the official non beta release.

I first realized that it might be a mess back at WWDC when they showed the apple TV ui, commenting on how the refractive glass “seamlessly blended into the content” or whatever all the while, in their own highly produced advertisement, I couldn’t help but find that the refractions were noticeably distracting. I couldn’t focus on anything else.

It feels like the UX equivalent of watching a Mr beast video, just maximum stimulation all the time. Maybe that’s their strategy for appealing to a new generation of smartphone users (</joking>).