If Apple was trying to make a splash with its Liquid Glass redesign of iOS 26, it succeeded—just maybe not in the way it had hoped to. In case you haven’t been keeping tabs on Apple’s ongoing iOS redesign saga, lots of people were (or are) kind of mad about the new look. And listen, I get it. Having converted to iOS 26 a few weeks back, there are some annoying choices, especially when it comes to accessibility. Let’s put it this way: contrast is not Liquid Glass’ strong suit. Personally, I’m more annoyed about Safari tabs getting buried beneath another tab, but who am I to tell you what to be grumpy about?
So, if you’re one of the many people who are not super pumped about the whole glass part of Liquid Glass in iOS 26, you’ll be psyched to know that Apple has capitulated to demands for what’s ostensibly an off switch. That’s right, you can nuke Liquid Glass for real this time. Here’s how:
- Download the latest version of iOS 26. That would be iOS 26.1 (not iOS 26.0.1, which you may already have downloaded).
- Once the new version is installed, changing the look of iOS 26 is really just a settings tweak. Navigate to Settings, Display and Brightness, and then Liquid Glass.
- Once you’re there, you can choose between two options: clear and tinted
- You’ve probably already intuited that the “clear” one is more glass-like, while the “tinted” one basically kills the glass altogether
That’s it. That’s all you have to do. It may not seem like much on the surface, but, historically, it feels like a big deal for Apple to let people roll back a design choice so pointedly. I guess you could characterize it in a couple of ways. On the one hand, it feels like Apple is giving in to the haters, which is objectively true. On the other hand, it feels like a rare case of Apple making a misstep so big that it has to walk the choice back fully.
Maybe so many years of playing it safe with iOS generations have made Apple soft to criticism, or perhaps it has just forgotten how to innovate on a software level. Still, either way, it looks like Liquid Glass might not be the bright, shiny new future Apple had hoped for. Or at least not if you have the “tinted” option enabled in your settings right now.
