December 20 2025
This morning I reluctantly updated my iPhone SE (3rd generation) from iOS 18.7.2 to iOS 26.2. I had been hoping for Santa Cook to bring me iOS 18.7.3 for Christmas. Apparently, though, we’ve all been naughty. Or maybe Cook himself is not nice. I was aware that it was (previously) possible to install iOS 18.7.3 by enabling beta software updates, but nowadays that requires enabling iCloud, which I refuse to do on my iPhone. According to MacRumors and my followers on social media, Apple has within the past 24 hours stopped providing 18.7.3 on the beta track. Moreover, Apple is providing restore image to developers for only a few iPhone models: XR, XS, and XS Max. Thus, it appears that iOS 18 is effectively discontinued on most devices, and iOS 18.7.2 suffers from actively exploited security vulnerabilities. Although Alan Dye has left Apple, the company is nonetheless forcing Dye’s design on customers.
This isn’t my first impression of Liquid Glass, or as I called it, Liquid Crass, a nickname that failed to catch on with the public, overshadowed by one a bit shorter and ironically crasser. Since WWDC, I had been running the new OS versions on test devices, a Mac mini and an iPad. What struck me on iPhone was something I hadn’t noticed as much on Mac and iPad: the animations. Here’s an annoying example in Safari when pressing the, uh, … button, for lack of a name.
To get rid of that animation, you need to enable both Reduce Motion and Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions in Motion Accessibility Settings.
Now it’s a bit better, though still far from perfect.
In general, I dislike Reduce Motion on iPhone, especially when switching between apps, but in this case I think the tradeoff is worth it, because I hate the new iOS 26 animations.
Notice the weird circular detritus after I close the popup. There are quite a few visual glitches remaining, three months after the public release of the new operating system. If iOS 26.0 was half-baked, iOS 26.2 is at most two-thirds-baked.
Needless to say, I enabled Reduce Transparency in Display & Text Size Accessibility Settings as soon as I updated to iOS 26. I had already enabled Show Borders and On/Off Labels in iOS 18 or earlier.
I also enabled the Tinted Liquid Glass option in Display & Brightness Settings. Oddly, you cannot toggle this setting while Reduce Transparency is enabled, for no apparent reason. Could we have these two Apple engineering teams talk to each other? Or if there’s just one Apple engineering team involved, could we have their left hands talk to their right hands?
Another annoying animation I noticed in Safari is the extreme slowness of opening the Safari extension popup window after tapping the extension icon in the menu. You can see in the video below that the menu itself opens relatively quickly when I tap the Manage Extensions widget, but there’s an inexplicable delay between the time that the menu disappears and the extension popup appears. This delay did not occur on iOS 18 and earlier.
I’ve filed a bug report about this (FB21387909) in Apple’s Feedback Assistant.
By the way, don’t get me started on the Liquid Crass replacement of close buttons with checkboxes. (On iOS 18, the checkbox in the video was a Done button.) This change is insane! And I’ve already had a customer confused by the checkbox, thinking that they had to “approve” something in the window. Even I get confused by the checkbox sometimes, not here specifically, but in some other apps. Apple, formerly the best at design, somehow became the worst. “Design is how it works,” they parrot, and this doesn’t work.