Busy Dye-ing
The aesthetics for icon design may have changed dramatically in the intervening years, but I just find it sad that, with the gorgeous displays we have today, Apple recommends simple designs made out of a few boring shapes, and everything is now in service of a ‘liquid glass’ effect the system superimposes on every aspect of the user interface — as if this surface gimmick is more important than the elements it distorts.
I’m sorry to sound like a broken record by now, but this is, once again, form before function, looks before workings. And don’t bother deviating from this new norm, because your app will be assimilated.
There are two stages to this, in two different axes (being: icons and the general UI).
The first stage is: I can't believe that Apple is doing their developers and their ecosystem dirty this way. In which way does someone look at all this and imagine that this will be sufficient for developers to express what they want to express? Look at the progression to this point, look at what is given up and look at for what. Negligible wins in screen space even on the most space constrained devices (aside from Apple Watch, where the layering and overlapping is highly limited to begin with), and effects that are technically impressive but not in the apparent service of any particular goal.
The second stage is: I can't believe that Apple is doing this to themselves. To their own icons and their own user interfaces. I have yet to find a single user interface in their own OS, in the most-baked Liquid Glass UIs currently in existence, that is functionally improved. There are loads of them that have been functionally and hierarchically crippled.
There is a famous story about how Bas Ording, legendary user interface mockup designer at Apple, vegged out in a couch outside an office after a failed interview; Steve Jobs walked by and Bas was able to persuade him to look at a mockup to solve the crowding problem of the Dock, which is pretty much exactly where Dock "magnification" came from. Steve was so impressed that he hired Bas on the spot, and Bas went on to have an outsized impact on setting the tone for Mac OS X, iPhone and iPad for more than a decade.
Bas was a wizard in Macromedia Director, an already outdated piece of software, but used it to mockup various interfaces, and in various constellations, user interfaces were iterated on and reviewed. Ken Kocienda's book Creative Selection details this continuing at least up until the original iPad software.
What this has to do with Liquid Glass is that Liquid Glass, and the Alan Dye direction of human interface in general, seems to come at things from a different angle entirely. Sources say that this was thrown together in months to weeks, and was preceded by failed attempts beforehand. Restarts are common in creative processes, but they usually don't come right at the end.
The Bas Ording school sometimes uses a neat effect to enable new functionality (seeing more things with Dock magnification, keeping track of where things go with windows animating in and out of sheets and the dock, shrinking and moving around with Exposé). But the effect was never the point. The visuals were tweaked from version to version and certainly changed over time.
The Alan Dye school always starts with dropping a manifesto. And they are sometimes necessary, especially if you're doing something that is alien to the current state of the art. But the most famous Apple manifesto of all, Think Different, was administered as a bolt to the heart, to tell people that what they were looking for was still there and to tell Apple employees the same. It was the bridge between, to use the parlance of the times, the Old World and New World, and set the tone for and was followed by a decade of product innovation - with new things that you could now do. What new things can you do with Liquid Glass? See 4% more of the underlying wallpaper, as a blurry mess? Tint app icons? (Yes, that is somewhat cool and somewhat useful.)
(iOS 26 contains improvements, like a context menu that shows all remaining items when expanded, but there's nothing about this that demands the Liquid Glass look-and-feel. I'm talking about what the Liquid Glass look-and-feel itself enables.)
The only motivation I can find for this, other than "to be able to show something big at all at WWDC25", is to enable some user interfaces in augmented or mixed reality where various forms of regular UIs could be claustrophobic. Well, guess what. Go back a month, and this was already the state of the art; visionOS, which may have had the strongest claim to utility, did have some form of this already. Other than as consistency for consistency's sake across all other platform, or as a fig leaf for the lack of Apple Intelligence progress and that whole debacle, or as a change which just plain looks "neat" or "new", what purpose does it serve?
None of the interfaces seem like they were iterated on in order to increase usability, readability, utility or understandability in the slightest. App icons are more subjective and harder to make fair judgements about, but Mori makes a meal of some examples and of arguing that nothing was gained but plenty was lost.
As far as I can tell, Apple's just lost its sense of UI design priorities completely.