Design

If you’ve been following Apple for some time, you know that there’s almost a natural – some would say “institutional” – process to how the company’s design team takes bold leaps forward, then refines and iterates on them over time. It happened with Aqua. It happened – loudly, in the age of social media and the then-nascent YouTuber space – with iOS 7. This year, it’s happening with Liquid Glass. As John Gruber once quipped: this is how Apple rolls.

It’s no secret that I ended up enjoying Liquid Glass and what Apple set out to achieve with its focus on fluid, compact interfaces. That appreciation has only grown over the past year: I found myself gravitating toward third-party apps that embraced Liquid Glass instead of the ones that stubbornly refused to acknowledge its existence, which is usually a pretty good sign that something is clicking with me. As I wrote last year, however, Liquid Glass was not perfect: it carried intrinsic readability and accessibility shortcomings that would often make some UI elements hard to visually parse or small text illegible against clear backgrounds.

On balance, Apple stuck the landing with Liquid Glass in iOS 26. Anecdotally speaking, in conversations I’ve had with real-life friends (who are most definitely not MacStories readers) over the past year, I’d say that Liquid Glass was a success with people. The fact that a bunch of Android manufacturers have ended up copying Liquid Glass is a sign that, despite what some fringes of the old Apple commentariat would have you believe, the market has not rejected Liquid Glass. At the end of the day, the numbers speak for themselves.

One of the reasons I like covering Apple products is what I mentioned at the outset: success notwithstanding, the company does not stand still. As I suspected last year, Apple designers have not gone back to the drawing board and “scrapped” Liquid Glass (I remember reading some folks suggest that); Liquid Glass is still here, as is the focus on minimizing UI chrome and emphasizing the content space. The company has, however, done something unusual with iOS 27: it has doubled down on both ends of the Liquid Glass spectrum by embracing, once again, customization.

Instead of attempting to find a “balanced” take on Liquid Glass that would please everybody, Apple now allows users who really love Liquid Glass to make it even clearer and “glass-ier” than before; at the same time, it’s letting folks who strongly dislike it make Liquid Glass more opaque and frostier than ever.

In addition to new personalization options, Apple has improved the underlying Liquid Glass rendering engine to diffuse content more effectively, reworked the specular highlights system to create a better “layered” effect than iOS 26, and more. Will this be enough to guarantee a smoother adoption by app developers who have resisted Liquid Glass? Are these changes a cop-out, or a reasonable move to make the iPhone more customizable for folks with different priorities and needs?

Let’s take a look.

Customizable Glass

The first major change for Liquid Glass in iOS 27 is a new ‘Appearance’ section of Settings that consolidates some options (which were previously available under ‘Display & Brightness’) and introduces new personalization settings for the Liquid Glass material.

In iOS 26, Liquid Glass could only be either ‘Clear’ or ‘Tinted’. In iOS 27, there is now a slider in Settings → Appearance → Liquid Glass that lets you choose any level between three default styles: More Clear, Default, and More Tinted. Unlike last year’s basic preview, the new screen in iOS 27 lets you preview what real UI elements would look like with different glass levels on top of photos of Apple Park’s ring building, the Rainbow, and a certain mythical creature.

The new customization menu for Liquid Glass.

At its clearest setting, Liquid Glass is as clear as it’s ever been. If you’re a Liquid Glass sicko like me and did not mind the ultra-glassy look of iOS 26 beta 1 last year, dragging the slider all the way to the left in iOS 27 is what you want to do. As long as you can live with severe legibility issues in apps that scroll content under tab bars or floating toolbars, you’re going to have the time of your life with a hyper-polished glass material that fluidly morphs and animates on screen even better than last year thanks to iOS 27’s (many) performance and rendering improvements. I’ll be blunt: this is the setting I use, and I love it. YOLO.

The same app with clearest Liquid Glass (left), default (center), and tinted.

iOS 26’s clear Liquid Glass vs. iOS 27’s clearest setting.

Tinted Liquid Glass across iOS 26 and 27. Notice the more “layered” appearance of iOS 27’s material.

On a more serious note, it is interesting to observe where the defaults have landed for Apple’s design team in the past year. On average, the new ‘Default’ option in iOS 27 is more tinted than the ‘Clear’ setting of iOS 26. This suggests to me that Apple collected feedback and understood that more people would benefit from having a slightly more tinted Liquid Glass appearance by default than the other way around. At the same time, Apple is introducing personalization as a way to appease those who loved Liquid Glass as well as those who couldn’t stand it.

I encourage everyone upgrading to iOS 27 today to play around with the new Liquid Glass appearance settings and see which one you prefer – and, remember, you can set the slider at any point between the three default styles offered by Apple. Below, I am including some comparison shots that demonstrate different Liquid Glass levels in Apple’s own apps as well as Waluigi’s Glass Lab, a demo app I created with Codex for this review to show off new Apple APIs and Liquid Glass UI elements. (No, I am not accepting testers for Waluigi’s Glass Lab, I’m sorry.)

A context menu in Files with clear (left) and tinted Liquid Glass.

Notice how the Notes toolbars change between clear and tinted Liquid Glass in iOS 27.

The Safari address bar with clear (left), default, and tinted Liquid Glass.

All third-party apps built for iOS 26 receive the new Liquid Glass material “for free” in iOS 27. Pictured: Overcast with clear setting (left) and tinted.

Waluigi’s Glass Lab with clear, default, and tinted Liquid Glass.

Clear and tinted Liquid Glass in this very important app.

After three months with iOS 27, my takeaway is that there’s more to this year’s Liquid Glass than different transparency levels alone. What I find more impressive, in fact, is the work that has gone into improving the underlying rendering engine and how it diffuses content and layers UI elements in the first place. It is maybe a little cliché to say, but this is what Liquid Glass should have been all along. Thanks to a combination of more effective diffusion and refraction, darkened edges, and brighter specular highlights, the updated Liquid Glass is more legible and does a better job of creating multiple “layers” of glass that stand out against content.

Take the Music app’s ‘Get Up!’ playlist and its warm orange background, for example, and its pink-accented tab bar. The selected ‘Home’ tab in iOS 27 is drastically more readable than last year’s – and I am using the clearest version of Liquid Glass.

Another iOS 26 reversal: the search button is back inside the tab bar instead of floating next to it. The other “button style” is still supported, but Apple itself is using the unified style again in its apps.

The context menu? The darker edge around it makes it feel more layered than before – almost as if it’s “floating” on screen. This has also allowed Apple designers to use a glassy material for it, which is stunning compared to last year’s dark context menu:

I mean, there’s no contest here, right?

As you use iOS 27, you’ll notice this better separation of layers and improved diffusion everywhere, so I’ll spare you the dozens of examples here. You get the gist.

All this begs the question: is customization a way to fix Liquid Glass’ underlying problems by sweeping them under the rug of “fine, you fix it for yourself”? Yes and no.

To an extent, a slider lets Apple have their cake and eat it too: Liquid Glass die-hards are happy, the material is a bit more tinted by default, and those who absolutely despise it can adjust the slider all the way to the right. But I’m not a pessimistic tech commentator, and I’ve followed this company long enough to reiterate that I believe the static, “bestowed upon users with no tweaking allowed” era of software design is over, and has been for a while. I don’t know if making Liquid Glass more customizable had always been in the cards; what I do know is that Apple has been embracing deeper user customization for several years now. A more customizable Liquid Glass is consistent with the work Apple has been doing in opinionated, yet flexible UI design for the last six versions of iOS.

If you ask me, it would have been a mistake for Apple not to make Liquid Glass more customizable this year. In fact, I’d go one step further and wish I could customize Liquid Glass per app, just like I can tweak text sizes for individual apps across the system. I’d love to make Music clear and Safari a bit more tinted, for example.

The new Liquid Glass looks great, and there continues to be nothing else that matches its aesthetic, performance, and shape-shifting nature across the entire tech landscape.