Do you hate the iPhone’s Liquid Glass? You’re going to love Apple’s next iOS 26 update

Love it or hate it, iOS 26 brought the most radical software redesign to the iPhone in over a decade. The company’s new design language, Liquid Glass, mimics how light in the real world warps and transforms when passing through physical glass.

Many iPhone users find Liquid Glass refreshing, fun, and technically impressive. Detractors of the new design say Liquid Glass’s myriad transparent toolbars and other UI elements, which let the content behind them bleed through, make iOS 26 harder to navigate than its predecessors.

Regardless of where you stand, Liquid Glass isn’t going away. Yet, if you fall into the latter camp and find the new design element distracting, you’ll be very happy with the next major update to iOS 26.

Apple will soon let you tone down the design

While iOS 26 shipped in September, that was just the first iteration of the software. Apple continues to develop the iPhone’s OS actively, and currently it is beta testing the next major update to the new operating system: iOS 26.1.

Apple has been testing iOS 26.1 for weeks now, and yesterday, it released the fourth beta of the software.

Hidden inside this beta was a new feature: a toggle to increase the opacity of Liquid Glass elements, giving them a less glassy and more frosted appearance.

The option to make Liquid Glass appear more like frosted glass, which Apple calls “tinted” (versus “clear”), makes it much easier to see the outline of individual buttons on menu bars and other UI elements, while still letting some of the color from behind the UI elements bleed through.

In short, the new option allows users to tone down the Liquid Glass look while still enjoying many of iOS 26’s redesigned benefits (9to5Mac has screenshots here of what the new “tinted” Liquid Glass looks like).

How to tone down Liquid Glass in iOS 26.1

Once you have iOS 26.1 on your iPhone, you can easily switch Liquid Glass from clear to tinted thanks to a new setting in the Settings app.

To tone down your Liquid Glass elements:

1. Open the Settings app in iOS 26.1.
2. Tap Display and Brightness.
3. Tap Liquid Glass.
4. Tap the “Tinted” option.

As Apple explains in a short message below the options, “Choose your preferred look for Liquid Glass. Clear is more transparent, revealing the content beneath. Tinted increases opacity and adds more contrast.”

It should be noted that the steps for toning down Liquid Glass may change by the time the final version of iOS 26.1 ships to the public, but as of iOS 26.1 beta 4, this is how you do it.

When will iOS 26.1 be available?

If you are an Apple developer or signed up to be an Apple public beta tester, you can download iOS 26.1 beta 4 right now.

But if you want to wait for the official release, you won’t need to wait long. 

Apple is likely to release iOS 26.1 to the public next week, perhaps as early as Monday, October 27.

Once it’s released, any iPhone that can run iOS 26 will be able to tone down the transparency effects of Liquid Glass.

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