Take

The WWDC 2026 keynote was interesting.

The Liquid Glass section focused entirely on how the first version needed work, and nearly all the highlights were about how improvements came from listening to developers and users and dialing what they had back.

The macOS standard sidebars don't live in a blob with very uncomfortable margins (which were required for there to be a layer fit in between the "traffic light" window controls and the window's edge). The macOS windows have a consistent and less decadent border radius. The glass texture can, at least optionally, be more of a tinted and foggy look to improve legibility and contrast. And there is a setting to show borders, which echoes back to the introduction of the "halo-ish" white outline border on windows from when Dark Mode was introduced, which were an inspired solution to solve the problem of the big window shadows being much less effective to show where one thing started and another ended.

Combined with some saner icon renderings — aside from when refraction is enabled, a feature which upside I have been unable to locate, and aside from still not letting innocents out of squircle jail — these are steps in the right direction. As is the attitude "we will need to make changes to things, and we will need to listen to what people are telling us", rather than the extended finger of your choice pointed from Cupertino towards the rest of the world.

That said, iOS 27 still suffers from the basic usability issues with Liquid Glass – like, say, the tendencies to pick up touches and taps in the sliver between the bottom/corner edge of the display and the tab bar. I suppose it is honest from a user interface perspective for links that are visible within that area to be tappable, but it is a terrible user experience. (When is the intent of the user to tap any of those things?) Together with the tinted glass, the solution that springs to mind here is to just extend the tab bar towards the edges, which would solve the problem, but is also what pre-Liquid Glass iOS did.

Apple has a long track record of usability achievements and ground-breaking user interface advancements. They've just seemed to forget what actually makes things better – or ended up in a place where what they had was so good that to bring out any difference whatsoever, the only way to do that is to regress. That some few details are returning to form is encouraging; whether it is because of insight and reflection (the other kind), or because of merely settling the crowd dictates where this could go next.