Liquid Glass Differences Between the Second and Third Betas ⇥ birchtree.me
As many now have commented on, today’s OS 26 betas tone down the liquid glass effect quite a bit on many elements in the operating system, and I’ve collected a few that stand out to me.
Liquid Glass officially has two appearances: clear and “regular”, which is frosted. If there have been any changes to the clear style in any of the betas, I cannot say I have noticed them. But the frosted style has become steadily more opaque since the first developer build of iOS 26 in some places. In particular, when iOS is in light mode and the screen is predominantly white, like the buttons in a Mail message, the effect is now extremely subtle, to the point where I wonder if there is a third Liquid Glass appearance.
I have no evidence for this other than the stark difference I can see between, say, the Notification Centre background — which obviously uses the clear appearance — the buttons at the bottom of, say, Mail or Music, and the edit menu, which appears to be about halfway as opaque. Without hard evidence for a third appearance, I have to assume this is either an optical illusion created by the size of each element, or the edit menu actually has a clear appearance, not regular as I have assumed.