The new Glassy Look for iPhone was toned down with Monday’s release of iOS 26’s third developer beta. This follows users’ complaints that some of the user interfaces have made them even more difficult to read.
At WWDC 2025 in June, Tech Giant introduced a new design language known as Liquid Glass. This is inspired by real-world optical qualities, including how light and its translucent properties are refracted.
However, the initial version of iOS 26’s first developer beta and the accompanying updates on other Apple devices leave room for improvement in terms of ease of use, accessibility and readability.
Last month, Apple fixed some of the more prominent issues with liquid glass. This created visual clutter and confusion with the Control Center increasing transparency and the iPhone’s home screen icons and widgets glowing.
In Monday’s update, Apple takes another step to dial things from an overly glassy look in many important areas. Beta 2 addressed the Control Center issue, but Beta 3 shifts focus to other areas of the mobile operating system, such as notifications and navigation within Apple’s first-party apps such as Apple Music.
For example, in the navigation bar of Apple’s streaming music app, you can see the background glow a bit and choose a more solid white.
Notifications are also not translucent, as the background behind the text becomes darker and the contrast increases.
The change will definitely make the feature easier to read, but some users complain that Apple has gone too far in other directions back to the “frost glass” aesthetic.
However, it is worth remembering that these are just developer beta versions. This is the early version of the mobile operating system that will not be confirmed until it is released this fall. The key to beta software is to allow Apple to gather feedback, spot bugs and address issues before the software is deployed more widely.
This means that Apple will continue to adjust the appearance of liquid glass with upcoming releases, and will be able to find sweet spots for all apps and new glass appearances within the screen.
