Apple looks like it’s easing up on one of its most controversial design bets.
The company’s latest iOS 26.2 betas introduce the first real signs that it’s willing to give users more control over Liquid Glass, the glossy, layered interface that debuted at WWDC 2025 and immediately split opinions.
The biggest change so far is a new Lock Screen transparency slider for the clock. It sounds tiny, and technically, it is, but it fixes one of Liquid Glass’s most common complaints: the time becoming unreadable when translucent numbers blend into a busy wallpaper.
Slide it left, and the clock becomes almost transparent. Slide it right, and it turns fully opaque, solving the legibility mess Liquid Glass sometimes created.
This marks a shift from Apple’s earlier approach. In iOS 26.1, Apple added a simple toggle that made the system’s Liquid Glass less transparent, but it wasn’t nearly enough. For a design that fundamentally relies on layered transparency, users needed granular control, not a binary switch. The new slider suggests that Apple finally agrees.
iOS 26.2 also tweaks the Liquid Glass animations, making menus and transitions look more fluid and water-like, which is closer to the original concept Apple showed off at WWDC. It’s clear Apple is still shaping the design, rather than treating it as a finished product.
For now, the slider only applies to the Lock Screen clock, but it’s the strongest indication yet that Apple may be preparing to expand controls across the system. And honestly, that’s the fix Liquid Glass has needed from the start. The visual style itself isn’t the issue — it’s the lack of flexibility in a design language that can easily clash with user content.
iOS 26.2 is still in beta, so more refinements are likely in the weeks ahead. But after months of scrutiny, Apple giving users even one slider feels like the company finally acknowledging what everyone’s been saying: a radical new UI needs options, not restrictions.
And if Apple keeps heading in this direction, a full system-wide transparency slider might not be far off.
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