Few interface changes Apple has made have been more criticized than their introduction of Liquid Glass in their version 26 operating system releases; few have been more praised than bringing a full-featured windowing environment to iPadOS 26.
Apple has learned from both changes and added maturity to them. Liquid Glass can now be practically disabled—almost turned off with Reduce Transparency—while the iPad received many more minor changes that are welcome, but not critical.
The introduction of Liquid Glass across Apple’s 26 releases of their operating systems elicited a lot of responses. A whole lot. It’s hard to know how hated this new interface approach was, but given how quickly Apple backed off from it, I would have to say a lot—particularly in iOS and iPadOS, where the translucency of Liquid Glass made it hard to find interface elements and read text.
Apple reacted by adding a feature in iOS 26.1/iPadOS 26.1 to reduce its impact by letting you switch between Clear, which was the original flavor of Liquid Glass, to Tinted, which reduced translucency by a fair amount, but not to zero.
In iOS 27/iPadOS 27, Apple switched up their approach, replacing the binary option with a slider from (now lowercase) clear to tinted, along with a preview of how it looks against interface elements.
If you want to go down to as close to zero Liquid Glass as possible, Reduce Transparency is still available, as described below.
Pick from more clear to more tinted
When you upgrade to iOS 27 or iPadOS 27, the last stages of the installation present a new screen that lets you choose to adjust Liquid Glass using a slider. If you don’t make the adjustment at that moment, you can do so later, or change your initial choice. Go to Settings > Appearance > Liquid Glass.
This new screen offers a slider you can drag from the left edge, which Apple describes as “More Clear” (most Liquid Glass effect) across a range to the right: “More Tinted” (most opaque). Apple makes it easy to visualize by providing a scrollable preview that shows Liquid Glass elements overlaid on a webpage with images and text.
At the More Clear setting, you can hardly read—or even find—the button and field over text and an image. The midway point is better, but still not ideal. More Tinted provides enough contrast for legibility. To me, this looks like what an interface designer would show an executive, expecting the executive to pick the most opaque option. Apple’s leadership didn’t do that for 26.0. In 26.1, we got a binary choice; in 27, a range of choices.
You can’t change the Liquid Glass intensity when either of the next two options is enabled. When you attempt to change the Liquid Glass setting, you’re told that Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast must be disabled. You can tap Turn Off.
Remove even more transparency
Apple separately offers two Accessibility settings that affected Liquid Glass in iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. In the 27 releases, only one of the two has any real impact:
- Reduce Transparency: Go to Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size and enable Reduce Transparency. This flattens Liquid Glass, removing transparency and providing an almost identical look to iOS 18/iPadOS 18. The level of Liquid Glass you have enabled doesn’t have an effect.
- Increase Contrast: Use Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Increase Contrast to bump up the difference in tones. In iOS 27/iPadOS 27, the difference appears slight, where it was sharply distinct in the previous releases.
