Apple’s Liquid Glass interface has always been a bold, polarizing experiment in translucency. With the iOS 27 public beta, the company is now letting users push it even further — into “More Clear” territory. One writer cranked the new slider all the way to maximum transparency and spent a full week living with the most warped, glassy, and delightfully distorted iPhone experience yet.
From notifications that ripple and refract app icons like light through actual glass, to menu bars that turn text into momentary abstract art, the clearest Liquid Glass setting revives the playful dimensionality Apple first chased more than a decade ago. It’s not the most practical choice for everyone, but for those willing to embrace the whimsy, it turns the phone into something closer to living, breathing art.
Wired‘s Reece Rogers dove in headfirst. Here’s what it felt like to go full transparent.
Fear not — if you don’t feel the same way as I do about transparency — you can drag that same slider to the right and boost the overall opacity of Liquid Glass. There’s still the option to Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast as well.
I immediately cranked my settings to maximum clarity after I downloaded the public beta and left the setting on for a week to get the full experience. I understand why some prefer the heavily tinted version or need to switch it for accessibility reasons, yet I reveled in the warped colors and characters as I experienced Liquid Glass in its clearest glory.
The “more clear” option also added an increased depth to my device — reminiscent of an Apple update from more than a decade ago, in iOS 7, that you likely haven’t thought about in a minute: 3D apps. Apple added a parallax wallpaper effect during the iPhone 5’s heyday that used the smartphone’s gyroscope to make it appear as if app icons on your home screen floated slightly above the background, visibly shifting to the phone’s tilt.
Both Liquid Glass and 3D app icons gave the iPhone a more tactile sense of dimensionality…
Halfway through my week of testing, this option started to look so normal to me that I worried I had accidentally reset my phone to the default and checked my settings to ensure “more clear” was still enabled. It was. Which was a relief, and a sign I’d adjusted to this clearer version of Liquid Glass even faster than anticipated…
[T]his clear-minded update was delightful to try, and I’m keeping up with my transparent lifestyle even after the weeklong experiment ended.
MacDailyNews Take: You might even say that Apple’s Liquid Glass cranked up to maximum transparency makes the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.
Please help support MacDailyNews — and enjoy subscriber-only articles, comments, chat, and more — by subscribing to our Substack: macdailynews.substack.com. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
LG is a catastrophic fail of Apple’s own GUI/UIX guidelines. Might be ‘fun’ for 20-somethings but an absolute nightmare with folks with impaired vision… Big bold “F” for FAIL