When a phone company as huge as Apple switches its user interface in such a mild way, usually there’s mild excitement from huge fans and mild confusion for regular people. The iPhone 17, which came out alongside the new iOS 26 “liquid glass” update, was a complete anomaly.
Never before has such a massive wave of hate come out against a phone company that has such a huge monopoly in our country, much less one that united pretty much everyone with that phone against it. For a decent amount of time, anyone who cared about phones at all knew how absolutely awful the iPhone 17 Pro Max and Liquid Glass looked.
Of course, this deterred pretty much no one from buying more Apple products. Despite the ugliness, for a lot of people, switching from an iPhone to an Android is very much like social death, even if an Android would probably look and work better than their new iPhone does.
Progress is never linear, as the new update readily shows.
iOS 26 is nothing short of a total abomination. For some reason, they chose to make everything see-through, which is awful for people with a themed phone or phone background. The Messages app is by far the worst offender of “looking ugly,” which is crazy, because it’s probably the most universally used app.
More than that, they changed the keyboard. Pretty much anyone who has an iPhone with the new update has noticed that they’re making more and more typos. This is technically correct and could easily be blamed on the different key sizes, which throw off people’s muscle memory. Instead, it’s because of a fairly major bug in the software that makes the typos for you, how convenient!
Essentially, one of the two core features of an iPhone has been rendered ugly at best and harder to use at worst.
The other major issue with the latest phones is the actual design of the 17 Pro Max. The phone itself kind of looks like if a toddler saw a phone one time and then drew it with crayons at daycare straight from memory. The main thing that I really like about them is the color. Apple is, in my opinion, a little too preoccupied with being a “professional phone” and doesn’t focus enough on being what it is: the phone everyone uses.
Almost everyone uses iPhones. Even if these new updates are ugly, it doesn’t matter. The social stigma against having a green text bubble is too ingrained in American culture to make anyone actually switch over to Android.
iPhones will stay the same “good-enough” quality they’ve always been. Even though the new update sucks, they’ll improve it, and everyone will forget about how awful they thought it was. Apple will maintain its social monopoly over the cell phone market, and everyone will go back to making fun of Android users like usual.
After all, who cares if your phone is good or bad? All that matters is that you’re better than those without it.