This Liquid Glass toggle is a window into Apple’s broken design process

How important is a toggle? You probably haven’t given much thought to those little settings sliders that you find scattered throughout iOS. But what if a toggle can shine a light on how a system is designed and the priorities of its creators? That’s something I think we can learn about Apple’s Liquid Glass redesign, and it’s not an encouraging lesson.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to love about Liquid Glass. I think it looks gorgeous in macOS Tahoe, and there are plenty of places in iOS 26 where it’s a real step up over the designs we saw in iOS 18 and before. But it’s hard for me to deny that I’m often irritated by it and left with the feeling that it’s an indulgence on Apple’s part, an example of the company trying to signal how clever its designers are rather than adding something of real, consistent value.

And that’s where the humble toggle comes in. Because in iOS 26, the transparent slider illustrates everything that’s wrong with Liquid Glass – and how far Apple has strayed from Steve Jobs’ guiding philosophy.

The Steve Jobs effect

I know, I know, invoking the “What would Steve Jobs think?” meme is one of the cardinal sins of tech journalism. But the Apple co-founder and all-around design maven left behind some hugely important rules on what makes a design truly great, and Liquid Glass is breaking many of them.

So, let me explain what’s wrong with the toggles in iOS 26. As an example, open the Settings app and go to an app such as Camera, where you’ll see a bunch of these toggles. Try sliding your thumb over one and holding it in place. You’ll notice the button transforms into a larger, glass-like nub that refracts light as it moves. It looks pretty attractive and almost mesmerizing the first time you use it..

But once you try to simply tap it, the toggle seems to jump as it moves across the screen, with the glassy and scaling effects now feeling much more prominent. The button gets so large as to be distracting and feels almost sluggish as it moves. The animation is impossible to miss, and that might be the point.

Apple’s design philosophy has always been to reduce extras and distractions in order to let the purpose of the product shine through. What is a toggle’s purpose? To enable something to happen (or not happen). It enables and it disables. In other words, its purpose is to be a means to an end, not the end itself. You would think it should therefore be sleek, minimal, and never distracting, something that gets out of your way quickly so you can go back to whatever you were doing before.

Jumping around like the Liquid Glass toggle is expressly and very obviously distracting. It’s violating Apple’s own design philosophy. And that contradiction has left me with an uneasy feeling: that the main inspiration behind Liquid Glass is form over function, to look cool rather than serve a useful purpose.

Competing for your attention

I don’t want to come across as some sort of staid, joyless grumbler. Products should look alluring, bold, and interesting, just as Liquid Glass does. But simply looking good shouldn’t be the primary motivation. If it is, it risks neglecting the benefits that come with a design that functions well and instead ends up with something that looks elegant but isn’t fun to use. As Steve Jobs’ famous maxim goes, “Design is how it works.”

Think about how Apple pitched Liquid Glass at WWDC. Alan Dye, Apple’s VP of Human Interface, summed it up this way: “Our goal is a beautiful new design that brings joy and delight to every user experience.” He repeatedly highlighted Liquid Glass’ “specular highlights,” “beauty, craft and joy,” and “vitality” that “create a more lively experience that we think you’ll find truly delightful.”

Foundry

Yet Dye rarely spoke about what tangible improvements this new look would bring to everyday usage. Many of those that he did highlight, such as alerts that now appear when you tap, could be achieved without Liquid Glass’s visual cues and are not inherent to its design. It was telling that Dye placed creating a “delightful” experience ahead of being familiar and easy to use when listing Liquid Glass’s advantages.

Dye also explained that Liquid Glass aims to put “greater focus on your content.” But with all of its shimmering, refracting properties and jumpy, water-like animations, Liquid Glass often takes the focus away from your content and onto itself. It’s an attention grabber, not a design that is deferential to your work.

For instance, is it essential that a contextual menu stretches as you pull on it? Or that a text magnifying glass wobbles as it moves? Certainly, these effects are pretty stunning when you see them in action. Yet they are also qualities that draw your attention, not ones that allow these incidental elements to get out of the way and put “greater focus on your content.” They want you to pay your attention to them, not to your work.

Cause for concern

It might feel like I’m making a lot of fuss over nothing, that this is all a storm in a rather small teacup. And I’ll admit that the motivations behind Liquid Glass might not seem like the most glaring problem with Apple’s design. But this feels important because it reveals some of Apple’s thinking when it comes to interface design.

Really, this isn’t about whether or not Liquid Glass looks nice. There are many parts of it that are undeniably lovely, from the slider that appears when you scroll over navigational buttons to the frosted glass mode selector in the Camera app.

Apple

Instead, it’s about Apple’s priority here. Is it to make insanely great products that enhance users’ lives? Or is it to simply make something that catches their eyes? No doubt there’s still plenty of the former to be found in iOS 26, but I’m worried that there’s an uncomfortable level of the latter, too.

Simply looking pretty should not be the basis of a design. A great design is great because of how it works, not just how it looks. Steve Jobs summed it up best when discussing the endless iMac G3 imitators who misunderstood what its design was all about: “The thing that all of our competitors are missing is that they think it’s about fashion, they think it’s about surface appearance … They say, ‘We’ll slap some color on this piece of junk computer, and we’ll have one, too.’ And they miss the point.”

Or take Jony Ive, who detested products that used “swoopy shapes to look good, stuff that is so aggressively designed, just to catch the eye. I think that’s arrogance, it’s not done for the benefit of the user.”

Doing something for reasons of fashion is one thing, but when those decisions worsen the user experience, as sometimes happens with Liquid Glass, it’s hard to tolerate. The fact that these toggles have made their way into iOS 26 should be cause for concern.

Still time for adjustments

Of course, making beautiful interface elements is a worthwhile pursuit. Great art makes you feel things that you can’t explain, after all. But when that art starts to negatively impact the experience in a distracting way, then it has failed to benefit the user.

And that brings us back to the unassuming toggle. If Apple can design one that features Liquid Glass’s gorgeous visual effects without the jumpy, distracting, “Hey look at me!” persistence of the current iteration, it’ll be a sign that it still understands Steve’s golden rule of design. And if it can bring that new way of thinking to the rest of Liquid Glass, iOS 26, and whatever comes after, will be a much better overall experience.

Liquid Glass is a multi-year project, so there’s still plenty of time for Apple to make adjustments, and I’ve no doubt it will, based on the changes we’ve already seen in the first few beta updates. I just hope Apple can also temper the thinking that lies underneath its recent design decisions before things get too out of hand.