iOS 26 looks new and modern. And for once, how Apple describes it — liquid glass — makes sense: it’s a lot of layers of transparent elements overlapping and, in places, the animations are quite… liquidy. Menus and buttons will respond to your touch, with some of them coalescing around your finger and sometimes separating out into new menus.

Indeed, Liquid Glass does bring somewhat of a major change to iOS 26, or what we would have called iOS 18 (Apple is switching iOS numbers to years, and iOS 26 will release in the fall). I've been using the developer beta of iOS 26 for some weeks now,

Apple has had two months to refine Liquid Glass since introducing the design language at WWDC. It’s dialed the effect back, then amped it back up. It’s addressed some of the biggest complaints — the Control Center, for one — and left us to live with some of the others. So after all the tweaks, how is everyone feeling about it?