One of the biggest changes introduced with iOS 26 was noticeable as soon as you rebooted your iPhone. The revamped Liquid Glass interface made icons, dialogs, and menus look a lot more rounded and translucent, and the same look expanded across iPadOS and macOS.
While Liquid Glass immediately won a lot of fans, not everyone is thrilled—and with the rollout of iOS 26.1, Apple has given users a way to tone down the Liquid Glass effect quite dramatically.
Reduce the Liquid Glass effect
There’s one main switch for this, which you can find by opening up the main iOS Settings menu, then tapping Display & Brightness, and Liquid Glass. You’ve then got two options to choose between: Clear (the original Liquid Glass look) and Tinted (which adds more of a solid background to on-screen elements).
Your choice is applied immediately, and you can see the change in the preview window. However, the difference isn’t as pronounced as you might expect across every part of iOS. One place you can see it is in the Photos app: Try scrolling up and down through your photo and video library and look at the floating bar at the bottom.
With Tinted selected, there’s no way to choose the color of the tint behind dialogs and menus—at least not yet. You’ll find that it switches from a light shade to a dark shade depending on what’s currently on screen. You’ll see the effect best in Apple’s own apps, including Photos, which have all been updated to match the new iOS 26 look.
There’s more in iOS 26.2
At the time of writing, Apple is still testing iOS 26.2, but it may have rolled out to the masses by the time you’re reading this. Assuming that all the features included in the iOS 26.2 beta make it to the final release, you’ll get another way of tweaking the look of Liquid Glass on your iPhone.
Specifically, you get the ability to adjust Liquid Glass on the lock screen too—where it can make text and icons a little illegible, depending on the wallpaper you’ve chosen. To find the option, long press on the lock screen, then choose Customize underneath the preview of the current lock screen.
Tap on the lock screen clock, and you’re able to switch between Glass (Liquid Glass) and Solid (no transparency). Even if you keep Liquid Glass in place, you get a slider underneath the color and font options, which lets you adjust the transparency of the effect. When you’re happy with how it looks, tap outside the pop-up dialog, then tap Done.
Other iOS 26 customization options
There are a few other tweaks you can make to the interface in iOS 26, which don’t specifically refer to the Liquid Glass look, but still affect it. If you open up Settings on your iPhone then tap Accessibility > Display & Text Size, you’ll find a Reduce Transparency toggle switch that dials down the Liquid Glass effect somewhat.
There are a few more entries on the same Display & Text Size menu that can be useful: Bold Text and Larger Text for making text on screen easier to read (even if Liquid Glass is enabled), and Increase Contrast for making it easier to pick out the foreground elements from the background on iOS.
Another option you might want to use can be found in the home screen customization options. Long press on a blank area of any home screen, then tap Edit > Customize. The panel that pops up lets you darken home screen icons, darken the background, and increase icon size—all of which can improve readability.
