Take

Danny Bolella, speaking to Apple Liquid Glass subject matter experts:

The rationale usually points to the initial community backlash, the slower adoption rate of iOS 26, and the news that Alan Dye left Apple for Meta. The prevailing theory has been: “Just wait it out. They’ll revert to flat design.”

I shared this exact sentiment with the Apple team.

Their reaction? Genuine shock. They were actually concerned that developers were holding onto this position.

[..]

The Apple engineers explained that a massive part of the initial Liquid Glass rollout was simply ensuring the foundation was solid. It had to be functional, it had to meet incredibly strict styling guidelines across every single Apple platform, and most importantly, it just had to work.

No one doubts that a lot of engineering went into the development of Liquid Glass. But it is hard to overestimate the degree to which Apple has completely lost contact with reality. Liquid Glass is an outright assault on usability, on user experience, on legibility; it incorporates fancy visuals, at the expense of nearly everything else. It is a user interface calamity.

You need only live with Liquid Glass for a short while to see places that even the most glowing critic, who accepts at face value the intent behind the changes, would agree it completely drops the ball. Odd margins, nonsensical visual weight, hard to read text, constantly shifting dark-to-white-to-dark-again backgrounds, blurry messes. There is no part of Liquid Glass that "just works", and Apple's insistence on its excellence is what is so deeply concerning about the situation.

But here is where it gets exciting.

The team was visibly enthusiastic about what is in store for WWDC26 and Xcode 27. While they wouldn’t drop any specific spoilers, they gave the very strong impression that this upcoming cycle is where Liquid Glass takes its first massive step into maturity.

Seeing their level of historical awareness regarding the iOS 7 transition—and their genuine excitement for what’s next—left me incredibly optimistic. The foundation is poured; now, they are getting ready to decorate the house.

As pessimistic as I am, no less after reading this, I am somewhat optimistic that there may be a second phase to Liquid Glass where it grows out of its glassiness and into something else. It is at least more likely that this will happen than that Apple will do a gigantic u-turn and roll back an enormous design change not a year after it happened, especially if it doesn't seem the problem with it; I guess hope springs eternal that the reason they don't see the problem with it is that the second phase brings back some of the things that are so dearly missed, and that the people in charge of it has always seen it as part of the proposition.

About this, I am what Hans Rosling termed a "possibilist" - it could happen - primarily fueled by the idea that the insistence of hierarchy enshrined in translucent controls and containers remains so pants-on-head stupid that further elements that make things stand out and apart more just plain make sense. The initial rollout would have to have been very rushed for this to not have been part of the first version, but a rushed rollout is exactly the kindest way to explain its current state.

But given the other parts of the article, which paint interest in visible buttons as an obsession with custom chrome (which, if it's coming from Apple given what Liquid Glass actually is, is highly ironic, given how much it distracts from both buttons, controls, application and content) and a more desirable obsession being that of a layer of controls "over the content", which follows a through-line of foggy translucency going back to 2015's introduction of Vibrancy, I'm not holding my breath.