I’ve been developing for Apple platforms since 2011. I lived through the last major UI refresh—flat design in iOS 7. People complained then too.
But this time feels different. Flat design actually simplified things. It stripped away the cruft and let users focus on what mattered. Liquid glass UI does the opposite. It buries utility behind flashy effects and makes users work harder, not easier. That’s not progress, that’s regression disguised as innovation.
The Control Center is basically unusable now. I worked on Outlook Mobile, where we obsessed over contrast ratios daily. This iOS 26 beta wouldn’t pass our internal review. It wouldn’t even get close.
This isn’t just bad design. It’s breaking accessibility for people who actually need to read their screens. We’d never ship something this low-contrast because it would violate our customer commitments.
Apple chose pretty over functional. That’s not progress.
AI Era: UI is Legacy?
The way humans interact with computers is changing. UI matters less when everything has chat or voice interfaces. You don’t need to tap buttons when you can just talk.
In 2018, Chinese startup Smartisan built the TNT Station—a workstation controlled entirely by voice.
Same company donated $170K to OpenSSL after Heartbleed. While others talked, they just wrote a check (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13069333).
However, Smartisan was too early. The company died, even after ByteDance acquired them.
Now it’s 2025, and I’m impatient with traditional interfaces. Keyboards and mice feel slow. My programming workflow is basically prompt engineering. I use voice input with GPT transcription instead of typing—it’s more accurate than Apple’s dictation, especially for me who’s not a native English speaker. Even this blog post was voice-written.
UI matters less than it did in 2013 when iOS 7 launched. The mobile market isn’t exploding anymore.
With slower growth, companies can’t afford teams of designers rebuilding their systems for liquid glass effects. Even as a designer, I think refreshing UI is the wrong priority.
We should build AI-native interfaces, not fancy UI with worse accessibility.
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