The new liquid glass design language – inspired by visionos on the vision pro helmet – arrives for all your Apple devices. IPhone owners can either install the beta developer now, or wait for the fall to see what is in store. Obviously, it looks good, but it provides significant updates to what you have on your iPhone at the moment which will soon feel even better to use, thanks to its updated reactivity.
This upgrade of iOS 18 is in fact not as dramatic as it might seem so. Visually, at least. (On the right, Apple jumps 19 and the other intermediate numbers.) Consider it as a retouching rather than a reconstructive surgery, with the other more banal characteristics of iOS 26 nestled below.
Liquid glass on the home screen is a fairly minimal change, which is a good thing. We are only in the first beta developer of the new operating system and design, and Apple will undoubtedly make adjustments until its final release.
Below, we will take a closer look at iOS 26 and iOS 18 to see what is different between the two. To find out more, this is why you may want to keep the beta version of the iOS 26 developer.
Home screen
Apple kept the new minimum liquid glass on the home screen, with only minor modifications of the default appearance of the Home screen compared to iOS 18.
Looking at the reception screens, the main difference you will see is that in iOS 26, the background of the quay and the search option which is between the quay and the icons of the home screen are more transparent and have a radiance on the edges, while in iOS 18, these are a little darker.
Other smaller changes are that the icons on iOS 26 seem slightly larger, and certain application icons seem to have been more influenced by the overhaul than others, in particular (from screenshots), the camera and the mail.
So that the liquid glass really shines on the home screen, you will want to opt for the “All Clear” mode, which will create the most dramatic change of your icons and widgets. Monitoring this path could potentially introduce certain vision problems, but “reduction in transparency” very well defines remedies.
Control center
Things here are largely unchanged. Apart from the new glassy look in iOS 26, commands 1×2 and 2×1 are more rounded than those of iOS 18.
Locking screen
It is easy to see the differences that liquid glass brings to the iPhone locking screen. The digital clock in iOS 26 dynamically resized according to the wallpaper and the number of notifications that you have at some point, which is quite cool. The clock itself on iOS 18 can be changed, but it will not change in response to the content displayed on the locking screen.
The background on the notifications is clearly different between the two versions of the operating system, iOS 18 offering more opacity and a black text against the almost transparent background of iOS 26 on the white text. The controls below in iOS 26 also look more like physical buttons with depth and more than one transparent background.
The new unlocking effect in iOS 26 is that the unlocking movement of your iPhone will appear as if you lift a glass sheet, highlighted by a shiny edge to give it a shape when you start to slide your finger upwards.
Dynamic menus and tab bars
The new dynamic tab of iOS 26 gives you a cleaner look and more space to display your content.
A new addition to iOS 26 is the introduction of dynamic tab bars into applications that will change depending on whether you scroll or try to perform a specific action. Apple says it will create a more intuitive experience while freeing up space for your content. If you were to replace the glass effect with highly saturated colors, no one would blame you to have confused this new tab bar with what Google does in Android 16 in some of its applications – they are very similar. But compared to iOS 18, this new dynamic tab bar should not only reduce sieving through several menus, but it looks pretty good in the process.
iOS 26 will dynamically adapt to clear and dark backgrounds
In iOS 26, the color of the menu icons and the text of the icon will adapt according to the background.
Although it is more difficult to compare the liquid glass to iOS 18 here, a functionality to come is that the buttons and the menus will adapt according to the background color of the content. For example, when you scroll through an application with a light background, the floating menu options will appear with black text for easier visualization and automatically change in white when scrolling to a dark background.
In iOS 18, certain aspects of user interface application would seem darker depending on the color of the background, but less than the way the liquid glass now manages it.
IOS has already revealed this type of functionality in a less dramatic way, as you can see from the screenshots of the photo application above. By comparing these to what is on the horizon, it is difficult not to be enthusiastic by the small liquid glass in store also.
These are just some of our initial results, and we will probably add more once we surf them. If you want more on iOS 26, consult three upcoming features which are a greater business than liquid glass.
