Transparent Development ⇥ arstechnica.com

One of the stranger qualities of this year’s Liquid Glass visual update is how much it is changing within just a few weeks. One would assume some designers with power at Apple would have recognized the illegibility of the first version before it was made available in June. Alas, it seems Apple is working things out in public now.

“Public” is a relative term. The ’26 operating systems are currently only being previewed to developers or, as it turns out, “developers” like me. Apple has not yet released a public beta. According to data collected by TelemetryDeck, iOS 26 (also referred to as “iOS 19” in their stats) is being used by around 2.5% of users of apps containing its analytics product. Even so, that could be millions of people at the scale of iOS.

Though I know there were changes in different releases of the iOS 7 development cycle, the first thing I thought of was the progression of Aqua in early builds of Mac OS X, first revealed in the second developer preview of 10.0. The most noticeable changes happened in the dock which, in the second and third previews, looked like a set of individual sometimes-underlined tiles. Those builds were released in January and February 2000; by the fourth preview, in May, the dock was closer to the version which eventually shipped. But those changes took place over many months; Mac OS X 10.0 did not ship to the public until March 2001. Complaints about the legibility of various translucent elements, however, were whittled away at for years to come. I have not seen anyone claim this was evidence Apple was misguided from the start with Aqua.

Assuming the entire Liquid Glass concept was a lock for the ’26 operating systems, would it be more or less acceptable for Apple to have shipped with the version debuted at WWDC, with any changes needing to wait until next year? I think it would have been silly to ship something clearly flawed — and flawedly clear, I suppose. It is not evidence Apple has been wrong all along when it comes to the ideas behind Liquid Glass, though it indicates the unique problems faced when working with transparency. But, also, you would think a company that has been working with transparent interfaces for twenty-five years would have some institutional memory and know what to avoid.

This rapid iteration is also a reminder of the pressure of Apple’s annual shipping schedule. As with iOS 7, I expect U.I. adjustments will continue in updates in the coming year.