The interface news this month is all about Progressive Delivery Apple’s iOS.

Apple scales back the glassiness of its ‘Liquid Glass’ design in latest test version of the iPhone software by Henry Chandonnet.

What happened was this: Apple’s designers developed a new design language they called “Liquid Glass”, which was basically a floating transparent distortion layer for controls. In one sense, this is an extension of transparency-as-menu, which has been coming back around since 2004 or so, such as in the form of Windows Aero.

This insider.com story covers what’s been going on since then:

In June, Apple released its first beta version of iOS 26, opening it up to developer testing. While the Liquid Glass aesthetic has its fair share of fans, some early testers found the new design to muddle the user experience, with background text and colors shining through the glass bubbles. The iPhone’s Control Center was a specific point of contention, with some saying the buttons were difficult to navigate given the level of shine-through.

They are now on version 3 of the beta, and each successive version has walked back the transparency of the ‘liquid glass’. Now it’s getting to the point where the people who liked the transparency are complaining because it’s not as innovative as it was when it debuted, and the people who are more concerned about visibility/usability are still not satisfied.

I think the key point is this quote: “While Apple does not currently let testers control how glassy their displays are, users can enable reduced transparency, a pre-existing accessible feature that unifies the background color.“

and this one: “I got used to the new design language,” Popov said. “As an Apple fan, I’d love to have a customized option so I can choose what effect to use.”

The assumption by Henry Chandonnet, the author of the article, and Popov, is that this could easily be configurable, and it’s reasonable and easy for Apple to allow users to change their own opacity to meet their own needs and aesthetics.

That assumption of configurability is a core part of Progressive Delivery – we don’t all need to have the same experience, even if we’re using the same software. Using feature flags and sticky settings, everyone gets their preferred interaction style.

If Apple Design is as smart as their reputation indicates, they would not just collect this “loud” feedback, but they would enable configurability and then collect information on where people set the defaults to. Developers are an important audience, but you’d want to be sure that the general audience got something closer to “correctly pre-set”, since the general audience doesn’t always think of configuring their experience.

I’ve sorted this post into “Alignment”, because alignment isn’t just about team alignment as software gets made, but aligning the experience of using the software with the needs of the user.

— Heidi