Apple quietly did something very un-Apple at WWDC 2026: it admitted the critics of its shiny new design language had a point – and then handed users a literal slider to tune it. The company is rolling out a set of changes to its Liquid Glass interface, including a new transparency control that lets you dial the effect from fully opaque to completely clear, plus tweaks to sidebars and app icons that respond directly to some of the loudest complaints from the past year.

When Apple introduced Liquid Glass across iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26, it sold it as a kind of living material: translucent UI chrome that reflects and refracts your wallpaper, shifts based on context, and reacts to motion in real time. Think of it as a more physically accurate, modern take on the old iOS 7 frosted blur – less frosting, more highly polished sheet of glass hovering above your content. Apple’s design team described it as combining the optical qualities of glass with a fluidity software could uniquely provide, and it immediately became the dominant visual language across the company’s platforms.

The reality, of course, is that living with a new design language is very different from watching its sizzle reel. Early adopters discovered that as beautiful as Liquid Glass could be in marketing shots, it could also be visually noisy, with menus and sidebars sometimes blending a little too eagerly into vivid wallpapers. Forums and social feeds filled with the usual spectrum of Apple UI discourse: some users loved the extra depth and motion, others wanted their opaque, utilitarian chrome back. In the meantime, the main “escape hatch” for people who disliked the effect was a fairly blunt Accessibility toggle – Reduce Transparency – that toned down the entire system, at the cost of some of the nuance Apple clearly wanted designers and developers to embrace.

The new slider is Apple’s answer to that tension, and it is surprisingly straightforward. Instead of burying Liquid Glass behind an all-or-nothing accessibility switch, Apple is exposing a dedicated control that lets you tune the transparency from fully opaque to completely clear. At one end, your interface chrome behaves more like the flatter, more solid iOS of old, with fewer background colors bleeding through and a stronger separation between content and controls. Push it toward the other extreme and you get the full aesthetic Apple demoed on stage last year: highly translucent surfaces that pull in your wallpaper’s color and lighting, with refraction and highlight effects that follow your movement.

This is not just a cosmetic flourish. Giving users a first-party slider for a flagship design language is Apple acknowledging that taste in UI is not monolithic, even inside its own ecosystem. It also suggests that the company wants to preserve Liquid Glass as a long-term identity – Bloomberg has already reported that iOS 27 and macOS 27 are not planning major reversals here – while making it more palatable to people who found the first iteration too aggressive. In other words, Liquid Glass is here to stay, but how glassy it feels on your devices is no longer entirely up to Cupertino.

Beyond the headline slider, Apple is also tweaking how sidebars behave, in a way that might sound subtle but matters a lot to people who live in productivity apps all day. Sidebars will now expand all the way to the edge of the window, rather than feeling like semi-floating panels that visually “cut off” the refraction effects at their boundaries. Under the new system, those refraction and lighting effects continue beneath the sidebar, which should make the layout feel more coherent and less like a stack of unrelated panes pasted together. And crucially for legibility and at-a-glance scanning, sidebar icons will retain their color instead of being washed into uniform tints by the Liquid Glass layer – a direct nod to complaints about losing quick visual anchors when everything turned into a similar translucent blob.

There is also a quieter, but interesting, evolution happening at the icon level. When Apple rolled out Liquid Glass, it took the opportunity to redesign its first-party app icons with more depth and consistency, leaning into layered compositions that could respond better to light and motion. With this latest update, Apple says it is pushing that further by baking additional layers of Liquid Glass directly into the icon artwork itself. That means app icons are not just flat images sitting on top of a glass dock; they themselves become miniature glass objects, reacting to environment and theme – light mode, dark mode, tinted themes, and even the clear look Apple has been showing in its design videos.

The interesting broader story here is how Liquid Glass sits in the lineage of Apple interface experiments. We have been here before: the heavy textures of OS X Aqua, the infamous skeuomorphic leather and felt era, the stark flatness of iOS 7, and then the gradual reintroduction of depth, shadows, and blur in the years that followed. Liquid Glass is the latest swing of that pendulum, except this time Apple is clearly trying to architect it as a more technically advanced, long-lived foundation. It relies on real-time rendering and dynamic highlights that respond to movement and context, which is only viable because Apple silicon now has enough GPU and ML headroom to treat the interface itself like a 3D scene.

You can also read these changes through a hardware lens. Commentators have already pointed out that Liquid Glass feels like a software preview for devices that are themselves more glassy and fluid: foldables, mixed-reality displays, and whatever comes after the current iPhone slab. The decision to stick with Liquid Glass into iOS 27 and macOS 27, rather than punting to yet another visual style, lines up with Apple’s habit of using interface design to acclimate users to future hardware thinking. In that context, making the design more tunable is not about retreating; it is about making sure the signature look does not alienate the very audience Apple wants to bring along to the next form factor.

It is also worth noting how this new slider fits alongside Apple’s existing accessibility and appearance controls. Right now, if you find Liquid Glass overwhelming, you can still go into Settings or System Settings, flip on Reduce Transparency, and instantly get a more opaque, high-contrast look across windows, menus, and controls. That path will remain important for users with visual sensitivity or contrast issues. The transparency slider, by contrast, feels more like an everyday customization tool: a way for people who like the design in principle to fine-tune it without giving it up entirely, much like picking a different wallpaper or adjusting icon size.

In the background, Apple has been actively coaching developers on how to design for Liquid Glass, nudging them toward layouts and visual treatments that take advantage of translucency instead of fighting it. The company’s design documentation and WWDC sessions frame Liquid Glass as a system-wide material, not just a theme, with guidelines on how to layer content, when to blur, and how to keep important text readable over complex backgrounds. The transparency slider adds an extra variable to that equation, but in practice, it is likely that the system will handle most of the heavy lifting, allowing third-party apps to inherit the right level of blur and tint automatically.

Zooming out, this announcement is small in word count but big in what it signals. For years, Apple has been accused of taking a “take it or leave it” attitude to visual design, leaving power users to hack around decisions with terminal commands, third-party tools, or deep accessibility settings. The Liquid Glass changes are not a complete reversal of that philosophy, but they are a sign that the company is more comfortable exposing knobs for core aesthetics when the stakes are high enough. At the same time, Apple is clearly not backing away from its conviction that Liquid Glass is the future of its platforms; it is refining the material and giving people more ways to live with it day to day.

If you have spent the last year longing for opaque sidebars and more readable icons, the new slider will probably go all the way to the “frosted” end the moment you install the update. If you are one of the fans who wanted even more of that shimmering, glass-on-glass futurism, you now get to push hard in the other direction. Either way, Apple’s message with this tweak is simple: Liquid Glass is not a phase. It is the new default look of Apple software – but for once, how bold that default feels is something you can decide for yourself.