{"id":161385,"date":"2025-09-16T18:15:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T18:15:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/161385\/"},"modified":"2025-09-16T18:15:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T18:15:06","slug":"this-liquid-glass-optical-illusion-on-ios-26-is-driving-me-insane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/161385\/","title":{"rendered":"This Liquid Glass Optical Illusion on iOS 26 Is Driving Me Insane"},"content":{"rendered":"

My colleagues didn\u2019t believe me when I told them all my app icons looked slightly crooked after updating my iPhone 16 Pro<\/a> to iOS 26 and getting Apple\u2019s new Liquid Glass<\/a> user interface.<\/p>\n

I told our staff reporter Kyle Barr\u2014an all-round consumer tech guru, mind you\u2014to look at my home screen and tell me that my icons were tilting slightly to the left, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. \u201cI don\u2019t see it,\u201d he said, trying to convince me there was no slanting. He checked his own newly updated iPhone 14 Pro and didn\u2019t see any tilted icons, either.<\/p>\n

Turns out we are both correct.<\/p>\n

To create the effect of glass and all of its reflective and shimmering properties, iOS 26 forces every icon on your iPhone home screen to have a slight glow to them in the top left and lower right corners. This gives the subtlest parallax effect when you tilt your iPhone, creating the illusion that they\u2019ve got the thinnest layer of depth.<\/p>\n

Against most home screen wallpapers\u2014particularly more colorful ones\u2014app icons do not appear skewed to the eye. All the hues draw attention away from the refractive app corners. But that\u2019s not the case with many dark wallpapers, or solid black like I have on my iPhone. On top of a pure black wallpaper and with the icons set to \u201cDark,\u201d \u201cClear,\u201d or \u201cTinted,\u201d everything looks tilted. I\u2019ve found it just a little bit disorienting and kind of frustrating if I look at my home screen for more than a few seconds.<\/p>\n

\"iOS26Do you see the tilt? \u00a9 Raymond Wong \/ Gizmodo <\/p>\n

I\u2019m not the only one bothered by this optical illusion. A post on r\/ios<\/a> has over 2.5K upvotes and nearly 500 comments at the time of writing. \u201cThe frame glow effect makes apps look tilted, and it\u2019s really distracting for me (I even feel a bit dizziness),\u201d wrote user tantunidevourer.<\/p>\n

People who hadn\u2019t noticed it after updating their iPhones confirmed the tilted icons. \u201cI hadn\u2019t noticed it at the first glance, but now I can\u2019t unsee the tilted app icons,\u201d wrote user Silacko<\/a>. Another Reddit user, OrganicCoffeeBean, said<\/a>, \u201cThis\u00a0update is making me feel drunk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some users have suggested turning off the parallax effect buried within the Accessibility section within the Settings app. Apple added a \u201cReduce Motion\u201d setting after users complained about the zooming in\/out icon animations in iOS 7<\/a> causing dizziness and nausea. (I was one of those users who felt nauseous at the zooming icon effect.) Turning on Reduce Motion kills the animations, and the additional \u201cPrefer Cross-Fade Transitions\u201d setting further helps \u201creduce the motion for user interface controls that slide in when appearing and disappearing,\u201d according to Apple\u2019s description. I turned on both settings and can confirm that it doesn\u2019t remove the refractive app icon corners. Maybe Apple will add another toggle to the ever-growing section under Accessibility in a future software update. At this point, why not just let users decide how liquidy and glassy they want iOS 26 on their devices with some kind of slider setting that lets you adjust the transparency?<\/p>\n

With Liquid Glass, Apple was going for a unified design language that runs across all of its products, from the iPhone to iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. Some people like the fluid-like interface; others hate it. If you\u2019re the latter, you can make Liquid Glass less liquidy and glassy with a few Accessibility tweaks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I wouldn\u2019t go as far as to say all of iOS 26 is an \u201coptical nightmare,<\/a>\u201d like Reddit user demenghi, but I do think there\u2019s room for improvement, or at the very least, more customization needs to be added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My colleagues didn\u2019t believe me when I told them all my app icons looked slightly crooked after updating…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":161386,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[517,4535,10183,4536,39758,74],"class_list":["post-161385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-apple","tag-ios","tag-ios-26","tag-iphone","tag-software-update","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161385\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}