Apple’s divisive Liquid Glass look isn’t going anywhere in iOS 27, but Apple is quietly working on the one thing critics and power users actually agree on: more control.

Right now, if you’re on iOS 26.1, you can only pick between two broad moods for the new UI – “Clear” and “Tinted” – buried inside Settings → Display & Brightness → Liquid Glass. “Clear” keeps the fully transparent, glass‑like aesthetic Apple originally shipped with iOS 26, where notifications, menus, and navigation bars float over your wallpaper with lots of the background bleeding through. “Tinted” dials up opacity and contrast so those same elements stand out more clearly and are easier to read, especially in busy wallpapers or harsh lighting.

It was a compromise, and a pretty limited one. Reviews and how‑to pieces from tech outlets, plus a lot of user chatter on Reddit, all hit the same note: the Clear/Tinted toggle is nice, but what people actually want is a slider. They want to find their own sweet spot between “too transparent to read” and “so opaque it may as well be flat again.” Some users have even been relying on accessibility options like Reduce Transparency as a hacky way to tame Liquid Glass, which says a lot about how polarizing the default look has been.

Apple clearly heard that feedback, at least on a small scale. With iOS 26.2, the company quietly shipped a Liquid Glass opacity slider, but only for one very specific element: the Lock Screen clock. In the Lock Screen customization screen, you can now drag a slider to make the time more “liquid” and see‑through, or closer to a solid, traditional clock. It’s a little quality‑of‑life tweak, but also a testbed for something bigger – a way for Apple to see how a granular control behaves visually, and how users respond to it.

That “something bigger” is what Mark Gurman is now talking about for iOS 27: a system‑wide Liquid Glass slider that affects the entire interface, not just one widget. In his Power On newsletter, he notes that the current internal builds of iOS 27 don’t feature a dramatic redesign, but they do include work on a global slider meant to precisely adjust how the whole UI looks. In other words, instead of a binary Clear/Tinted choice, you’d be able to push Liquid Glass from “barely frosted” to “almost opaque” across the system, potentially covering notifications, control surfaces, menus, and maybe even app chrome.

Interestingly, this isn’t a brand‑new idea that Apple just thought up for iOS 27. According to Gurman, the company originally tried to ship a system‑wide slider with iOS 26 itself, but ran into engineering issues applying it consistently across all corners of the OS. Coordinating wallpapers, blur layers, text legibility, and animations while a user can arbitrarily change opacity is trickier than it sounds. Rather than ship something buggy or visually inconsistent, Apple appears to have pulled back, scoped it down to the Lock Screen clock in 26.2, and is now “trying again” for 27. As Gurman puts it, Apple is working on it for iOS 27, but “TBD if it lands.”

All of this is happening against a pretty noisy backdrop. Liquid Glass itself has been controversial from day one. Gurman has reported that Apple has no plans to abandon the new interface in the near term, even amidst internal design‑team changes, and other coverage echoes that the company is doubling down on it. At the same time, Apple is juggling other priorities: getting Siri into shape after multiple delays, preparing a long‑rumored smart home hub, and tuning iOS 27 for a future foldable iPhone and for macOS 27 on the Mac side. None of that screams “massive visual reset is coming,” which makes a slider a very Apple‑like compromise: keep the new design direction, but give users a little more agency over how aggressive it feels.

If Apple pulls it off, the system‑wide Liquid Glass slider has a chance to turn one of iOS 26’s biggest complaints into a quiet win. Instead of arguing over whether the UI should be ultra‑glass or more solid, users could just drag the effect to something that works for their eyes, their wallpaper, and their lighting. For people who love the new look, nothing really changes. For everyone else, it might finally feel like Apple is acknowledging that “one transparency level fits all” was never going to cut it. And with iOS 27 betas expected to kick off around WWDC in June ahead of a fall public release, developers and early adopters might not have to wait too long to see whether that slider actually makes the cut.