It's time we acknowledge that the purpose of most UI "progress" or "change" is sales.
An entity like Apple introduces UI "enhancement" to attract prospective users and persuade existing users that the functionality of the product is new, efficient, or otherwise "good."
UI is generally fashion and trend that seeks the "new" at great cost.
This is why there is a lack of internal consistency or rigor with respect to some UI direction: consistency, functionality, etc. are not the point.
About the icons: Original book looked best: we have lots of pixels, why not use them? The icon has a non-standard shape, making it easy to spot. Or if you actually need to have icon-shaped outlines, top-right one is beautiful, too. Although the shading should perhaps be removed if some OSs have their own shade logic for the whole images.
The rounding on the corners bothers me more than anything else. It just doesn't look good on a mobile screen. There's already minimal space to play with, why make the target zone for a button even smaller? It adds to visual noise as well.
I believe that at this point Apple is less concerned about the mobile screen, with their existing userbase sufficiently locked-in the priority is probably a UI-language that works (and blends) well on large surfaces (AR-glasses)...
Which is strange given that VR and AR are niche at best. The smartphone took off at the time because it was affordable and unobtrusive, Apple's own AR device is just silly to use in public.
(I'm aware this is partly cultural desensitization, I remember the memes back when of people looking like shrimps staring at their phones etc).
I have only been able to play with iOS 26 so far a little bit in the simulator, and so far it seems fine. To me it feels like after a couple months I will likely forget that a change was made (which TBH I think is a good thing, unlike when Windows has tried to make a change and never completes...).
However there is one thing that I wanted to comment on here:
> I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple. The guidelines and rules are meant to sublimate the brands of the third party, and replace it with Apple.
Personally one of the things that drives me insane is when an app tries to be special and have its own design language (looking at you Google) on my iOS device. The OS has an established design language and really should be used for most applications.
I understand wanting to have a brand identity but too many apps take this too far that just lead to a clunky experience.
> The OS has an established design language and really should be used for most applications.
This is a valid point.
The other side of the story is that the iOS ecosystem is a marketplace where merchants offer goods and services, including Apple themselves.
Apple increasingly wants to decide how you present your brand, to the point that the only brand-language Apple allows on its devices is its own.
I think it's reasonable that merchants in this marketplace feel the increased pressure to work less on creating and refining their own identity and more on normalizing their offer like it could come directly from Apple, at their own expense and financial risk.
On a phone, it can be tempting for an app developer to approach design as if their app is temporarily taking over the phone and transforming the entire device into the custom gadget your app embodies, since the app's UI will be filling almost the entire screen. On a desktop, it's more obvious that an app should instead strive to coexist alongside (literally) other apps and the rest of the OS.
But in either case, ignoring the platform's established design language and UI conventions is still wrong, and not taking advantage of the user's preexisting knowledge about how to use their device is a wasted opportunity at best, insulting at worst. If the only reason for doing so is that you are placing your brand identity over actual usability and insist that your app look and feel the same on any device regardless of context, that's at the insulting hubris end of the spectrum. Given how widespread that problem is, it seems entirely appropriate and deserved for app developers to feel pressure from Apple (or any other OS vendor) to put more effort into conforming. We as users shouldn't want any app ecosystem to fragment into the mid-2000s WWW full of Flash UIs with zero accessibility.
I have a feeling this will be yet another case of the nerds thinking something is a huge deal and when people update their phones this fall I bet most people won't care after 10 minutes.
It is probably largely true, but for people with vision and memory impairments Liquid Glass will be harder to use.
It will be harder to use for non-impaired people as well, though they might not consciously notice and/or still like how it looks despite being harder to use.
[dead]
Almost hilarous:
> Apple Design-Guide: "Ensure that you clearly separate your content from navigation elements [..]"
Honest auto-complete:
"[..] the OS will then use the GPU to draw all attention away from the content to the navigation elements"
> I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple. The guidelines and rules are meant to sublimate the brands of the third party, and replace it with Apple.
I have the same impression. Frankly I believe the whole purpose of "Liquid Glass" is to create an exaggerated version of the GUI Apple intends to use later-on in AR glasses, which is then toned back again in later releases to match the feasible implementation on the glasses.
The expected migration curve seems to be to force all applications now to become more bland and less distinguishable from the OS (and Apple services), so that at the end of the journey (in a future AR-product) Apple can #1 render those apps consistently without disrupting their UX and #2 present itself as the user-facing service provider for all the value created by those apps (with the app-developer being responsible for the integration and UX-compliance).
It's a dream-scenario. Need a ride-hailing service? Let "the Apple glasses" do it for you. Under the hood the apps are then hopefully so streamlined already that service-providers will compete to be the fulfilment entity for this task.
> Under the hood the apps are then hopefully so streamlined already that service-providers will compete to be the fulfilment entity for this task.
Probably going to be against the hivemind on this one, but I for one welcome this. Public transport, taxis, flights, hotels, to a degree even restaurants are fungible. I want to get from A to B, I want to have a bed for a few nights in some other city, I want to get some specific food.
That's what I need. What I do not want is to waste time to get what I need with bullshit.
That's why I love the "evil B" of hospitality - I see all available hotels for my travel, the associated price and pictures. I select an offer (usually the cheapest one that still has decent reviews), I click on "book", I confirm my data, that's it. I don't need to wade through dozens of websites, enter my data a dozen times, and then finally enter payment data on yet another shady website that's probably gonna get hacked sooner or later.
I don't want to waste my time researching the phone number of the local taxi company, so taxi.de it is, I only select where I need to go and a few minutes later a taxi shows up, no need to call someone, spell out the street name I live in to someone barely understanding me on the phone because Germany's phone service is dogshit.
I don't care about which specific Chinese restaurant I want, so I go on Lieferando, and half an hour later a nice load of fried rice with greens shows up at my door. And every time I have to go to a specific place (say for an anniversary) I know exactly why I despise the old way - everyone does seat reservations differently, no integration with anything.
What still irks me is flight booking, because while Google and a fair few other resellers/brokers do at least compare available options of different fulfilment providers, the actual booking I have to do is still on each airline's different web page. And rail travel is similarly annoying once you try to leave Germany.
This is very valid, I also don't like to install an app for every service. And I don't think there's a "hivemind" on this at all.
But it's reasonable that the merchants offering in the marketplace of that ecosystem start to observe how their opportunity to become the next "evil B of X" are increasingly diminished, in favor of being the fulfilment entity for the "benevolent A".
I neither need an "evil B" nor a "benevolent A", and substituting one for the other is not a solution either...
> I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple
I got my first taste of computers on early 90's Macs and was enchanted. Within a year I discovered DOS, Windows - and freedom. I did tech support for both Mac and Windows computers for several years. It's always been abundantly clear that the Empire of Mac exists for its own glorification (and obscene profits) - customers, developers, partners - they are all in service of Apple. It's unfortunate that Apple does some things with unparalleled quality and maintains a loyal following, because the apple has always been rotten at its core.
I’m not a professional designer, but I like Liquid Glass. If you don’t like it, stay on iOS 18 or switch to Android.
Aside from the criticism of icons, every complaint in the article just came across as nit-picks.
Beside of the fact that App-Developers don't have the option to "stay on iOS18 or switch to Android", that statement is equivalent to "Stop criticizing my country. If you don't like what it is doing, find yourself another country".
Developers (and users) are citizens of that ecosystem, serving other citizens and contributing to its economy. It is their right to judge and criticize directions being taken.
The owner of that ecosystem must endure and acknowledge this (especially when he continuously makes efforts to increase the difficulty to LEAVE that ecosystem), and other citizens should not take any offense from this at all.
> The owner of that ecosystem must endure and acknowledge this
Do they need to acknowledge it? Ecosystems aren't countries, they're markets, and citizenship doesn't exist here in the same sense – only participation in the ecosystem. Maybe there's some EU chicanery that makes it illegal for American companies to ship a UI that's displeasing to European tastes, but if we pretend that Apple is strictly an American company, would they need to acknowledge this at all if it didn't affect sales?
Same sht over and over again.
Apple keeps good or great things as their are: Apple is loosing its edge look how other are so innovative.
Apple takes some risk and go bold on things: Why changing things?
At the end everyone else complaining would just follow and copy.
Rinse and repeat, bring the eyeballs and the money to my btching site or profile.
I think "sales" is just one of the post-hoc rationalizations. The real purpose very often is simply to justify the money you spent on UI designers; there's a kind of sunk cost fallacy where spending resources exploring design changes leaves management feeling like they must ship some kind of design change, and the UI designers are strongly in favor of leaving their mark on the product and securing a big accomplishment on their resume.
The incentives simply aren't aligned to support a long-term strategy of not constantly messing with your UI.
> The real purpose very often is simply to justify the money you spent on UI designers
It's backwards. It's for the UI designers to justify the money spent on them. They can't just sit there and do nothing. Designing is their job! It's the same with every position.
Do you dress with a hat and shirt like someone in the 50s?
I see many angry comments because it's a change without a practical reason, and it's meant to make things more "new" or "fresh" at the cost of CPU and GPU resources. That's a valid complaint since making old devices obsolete is a design choice.
However, it's good to see it from a humane perspective. Fashion trends change because they are associated with identity, novelty, status, self-expression, etc. Companies make fashion changes to appeal to those things. For example, nobody complains if Nike changes a model just for fashion; however, everybody uses the same phone every day, just as they do with a pair of shoes. For us, working on programming or software design, the phone is just a tool, but for most people, the phone is a form of self-expression (like using single or double quotes in code, or tabs vs spaces). And every few years, tech companies undergo a fashion refresh.
So, even if Apple fires all the visual designers and keeps the same design for many years, people will likely grow bored with their UIs, which will push them toward competitors offering more stylish options.
The problem is this mindset that constant UI churn chasing "fashion" could ever be purely superficial and harmless. You say people would grow bored with a UI that never changes, but on the other hand, people learn to use a UI that doesn't constantly change.
Changing UI layout obviously breaks muscle memory, but even just reskinning the same layout with a new color scheme that changes the relative visual prominence of different UI elements brings usability penalties. It's rare that any UI change is purely beneficial or has no effect on usability. Unless proven otherwise, any UI change should be assumed to impose some usability harm on existing users, and the potential usability benefits of the change need to be weighed against that harm.
Don't pretend that the downsides of messing with an existing UI aren't real.
I agree! The problem is that in software users don't have to option of retaining the old UI while updating the rest of the product, so there's always a fuss when some people prefer the old UI but are unwillingly forced to use the new one.
It's a management failure. Either management is directly approving gratuitous UI redesigns, or they're making the mistake of giving designers unrestrained freedom to decide what UI changes ship.
And messing with the UI is the single most salient thing that makes regular people hate using computers, and do so only when it is required.
It doesn't matter what is their justification about making something "better".
The industry has reached saturation; there no longer exists any justification for making a UI somehow "better" to invite in more users. Changes ONLY create frustration and anger among existing users, which is essentially everyone at this point.
Changing the way a UI operates is like in an automobile swapping the position of the accelerator and braking pedals and moving the windshield wiper controls to the center console, heater controls to a steering-wheel stalk, and then claiming it is a "New Fresh User Interface!!". Of course people CAN adapt, but they will not like it. And automakers are already discovering how moving features from tactile knobs & buttons to a center touchscreen is hated and are going back to what people know and like.
It is past time for the software industry to get the message.
Does it drive sales though? Windows XP remained popular long after Vista was introduced. It was seen as stable and familiar. I guess the difference is that in the Apple ecosystem, you don't have much choice over which OS version you use. Apple tends to keep users on the latest version that the hardware supports.
Looks like the currently 3 versions of mac OS are supported. current is macos 15, macos 13-14 are supported.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_os#Timeline_of_releases
macos 13 supports hardware back to 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_Ventura#Supported_hardwa...
looks like only 2 versions of Windows is supported. current is windows 11 and windows 10 support ends in October. of course, windows 10 was released in 2015 so comparing version support isnt a fair comparison.
People stuck with XP because Vista was slow and buggy.
> … the purpose of most UI "progress" or "change" is sales.
If only! I wouldn't install macOS or iOS with that GUI if they payed me for it.
Pity those of us with commercial Mac apps.
UI change is similar to fashion. Things can't remain stagnant, they must change.
I don't see that as a bad thing. Nominally superficial change can a nice way to have a fresh look at something you've stopped noticing. I can be enjoyable simply because its new.
Yeah I agree. I think it's the same way as fashion - it's often not new styles, just new takes on the past. But it keeps things fresh and interesting.