- Apple’s iOS 26.2 update features a useful tweak for Liquid Glass
- You can now change the transparency of the lock screen clock
- This is done with an easy to use slider.
Apple has been releasing beta builds for iOS 26.2 and the latest beta 1 and beta 2 updates have added some interesting new features to the mix. Some of the most striking changes have come to the design of Liquid Glass’s interface and suggest that Apple is finally taking some steps to fix Liquid Glass for good.
Liquid Glass has proven to be divisive since it was announced at WWDC 2025 in June, and part of the problem is that Apple gives you very little control over the design aspect. Considering that the interface uses glassy elements that can overlap and obscure the elements underneath, that’s a problem, but iOS 26.2 fixes that somewhat, if only in a small way.
In iOS 26.2, there is now a slider to control how transparent the clock digits are on the lock screen. Move the slider all the way to the left and the numbers will become almost completely clear. Move it to the right and they will become more and more opaque.
It’s a small change, but an important one, as previously it was almost impossible to tell the time if it was superimposed on certain background images. Due to the transparency effects of Liquid Glass, images behind the watch could clash with its numbers, making it very difficult to read the time.
Continuous improvements
The move follows a similar decision by Apple in iOS 26.1, where the company added a switch to change the OS-wide Liquid Glass implementation from fully transparent to slightly more opaque. While this was a welcome step, in my opinion it didn’t go far enough: what Apple really needed to do was give users a slider to control Liquid Glass as they saw fit.
Now that such a slider has made its way to the lock screen, I’m hopeful that Apple will finally see the light and bring this feature to the system as a whole. I don’t care for Liquid Glass itself, but it’s such a radical redesign – and with so many potential pitfalls – that users should really be able to adjust it as needed to avoid the types of readability issues we’ve seen so far.
The lock screen slider isn’t the only way Apple has been working on Liquid Glass in iOS 26.2. The company has also adjusted some interface animations so that they now show a more fluid and water-like appearance. An example is opening a menu, as demonstrated by Aaron Perris in X, and this brings Liquid Glass a little closer to the animation style that Apple first introduced at WWDC 2025.
Clearly, Liquid Glass is still a work in progress and I hope Apple continues to refine it over the coming weeks and months. Hopefully, the company will realize that granting a little control to users isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If so, I hope a universal slider to change the transparency of Liquid Glass isn’t too far on the horizon.
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