The Apple universe seems to be a place where sentiment is driven by tastemakers and small-group consensus, not the mass of actual customers. So it doesn’t need to be a dominant complaint to have a big effect.

The griping I read about Liquid Glass is from the unhip nerds on HN (like me). I don’t actually know what the industrial designers and graphic artists in their Soho lofts think. I asked an exec designer that I know IRL and got a shrug.

Yeah. The vast majority of people simply don't give a flying shit, and many haven't really even noticed.

Also most of the stuff people complain about is easily changed in settings (transparency, etc...).

That's fair, by "everyone" it's probably only several million people.

Other than that, I stand by my statement exactly. This is very bad.

I think people are using "liquid glass" as a blanket term that includes other changes in iOS 26, like completely breaking message delivery with the world's dumbest spam filter, aggressively waking some people up in the middle of the night, siri somehow getting even worse, breaking the incoming call state machine (again), bluetooth regressions, regressions to their (already poor) UI accessibility, and so on.

Those other things add up and are definitely noticed by non-tech users that don't care that things like the alarm UI are massively regressed.

Are you from the future? Because on the current timeline it's much too early to tell if it's overstated or understated.