Liquid Glass? Not a fan.

[interavalon]

honestly im kinda indifferent. i dont know why but i feel like its missing something

[tmg86]

It's... fine. What gets in the way of it being a truly appealing aesthetic is the fact that you either go all the way with a 3D feel and zero colors, or else you give it color and make it flat again. If they could find a way to make it colorful without sacrificing the glassy look, I would be more on board with it.
ADDENDUM: If you look at the comparison below, you can see how it especially suffers in dark mode. I'll give Apple points for trying though, because it cannot be easy to make a dynamic skeuomorphic design:

It's not really even frutiger aero. It's literally just flat design with more blur and shadow effects wasting gpu cycles while being barely visible as you said.
The windows 7 explorer icon is a bitmap image inside of a .ICO file. There are no gpu and cpu cycles wasted on redrawing the effects in the image. The icons in iOS 26 are svg files with too many effects that are computed on the phone in real time.
If you have iOS 26, rotate your phone on a flat table and watch the highlight effects whir around the app icons. I didn't notice this until someone showed me. Tiny effects like this are cool, but the amount of power it wastes is silly, just give us a png image with effort.
I am happy about iOS 26, but I am disappointed in its execution.

[tmg86]

The icons in iOS 26 are svg files with too many effects that are computed on the phone in real time.
If you have iOS 26, rotate your phone on a flat table and watch the highlight effects whir around the app icons. I didn't notice this until someone showed me. Tiny effects like this are cool, but the amount of power it wastes is silly, just give us a PNG image with effort.

I didn't elaborate on this trick enough, open the control center and tilt your phone. There are shine effects that rotate around the icons.

[rnottelovesowls]

my opinions on liquid glass are mixed. i like it, it’s better than flat, minimalist design, but damn is it draining on battery life. hopefully there will come an update someday to optimize it for battery life

[GENOSAD]

my opinions on liquid glass are mixed. i like it, it’s better than flat, minimalist design, but damn is it draining on battery life. hopefully there will come an update someday to optimize it for battery life

I'm sure the next iPhone will undoubtedly handle the style better than whatever the current one is (iPhone 12? idk, I stopped counting after 6). Unfortunately, that means throwing away your current phone for whatever top-of-the-line bullshit they roll out...
Look up "planned obsolescence." You'll never look at companies the same way.

[rnottelovesowls]

Look up "planned obsolescence." You'll never look at companies the same way.

oh, i’m PLENTY familiar with planned obsolescence. the fact that every time i get a new android phone, it craps out after less than a year, while both my iPhone SE 2nd gen from 5 years ago and iPad pro 3rd gen from 4 years ago still run well to this day, is enough evidence i need to never invest in the “latest technology”

[cat]

Me personally, I feel like that Liquid Glass is just Newmorphism with some glassy-like reflections. I'm really not a fan of it, mostly because it's too transparent.

I'm not sure if it's only me but I love the transparency and fluid glass design and I think it is really cool compared to what we had before.

[solinus]

Look up "planned obsolescence." You'll never look at companies the same way.

oh, i’m PLENTY familiar with planned obsolescence. the fact that every time i get a new android phone, it craps out after less than a year, while both my iPhone SE 2nd gen from 5 years ago and iPad pro 3rd gen from 4 years ago still run well to this day, is enough evidence i need to never invest in the “latest technology”

Odd, my low tier Samsung a32 has lasted me since 2022 and only in august did the power button crap out. Enabled tap twice to wake and accessibility widget to sleep.

[GENOSAD]

Look up "planned obsolescence." You'll never look at companies the same way.

oh, i’m PLENTY familiar with planned obsolescence. the fact that every time i get a new android phone, it craps out after less than a year, while both my iPhone SE 2nd gen from 5 years ago and iPad pro 3rd gen from 4 years ago still run well to this day, is enough evidence i need to never invest in the “latest technology”

Odd, my low tier Samsung a32 has lasted me since 2022 and only in august did the power button crap out. Enabled tap twice to wake and accessibility widget to sleep.

Yeah, at risk of derailing the thread, I do think that Android phones are a case-by-case basis. I had a Moto g7 that lasted me from 2018 up until last year before the battery went bad. And I mean really bad, as in I couldn't go through a day without it committing seppuku. Although, I'll admit that I might have just been stubbornly holding on to a piece of tech I wasn't ready to replace.
Honestly, I'm surprised by the longevity of the Samsung because that's the type of anti-consumer design you would expect from the biggest names in smartphone production.

[jamesjaysinger]

Maybe I'm wrong (I don't have an Iphone), but it still feels minimalistic. The UI doesn't feel "material" enough, it's still a lot more abstract. We didn't get the IOS 6 skeuomorphism back. Liquid glass feels like it's trying to be an in-between design, it's not flat but it isn't skeuomorphic either. It's got more depth than the previous flat design but not it's not glossy or "realistic".

This makes me wonder if liquid glass will actually kill off flat design, companies don't seem more eager to change their whole design philosophy (yet), they're just trying to make flat design a little less boring.