- Apple’s iOS 26.2 update features a useful tweak for Liquid Glass
- You can now change the transparency of the Lock Screen’s clock
- This is done with an easy-to-use slider
Apple has been releasing betas for iOS 26.2, and the latest beta 1 and beta 2 updates have added a few interesting new features into the mix. Some of the most eye-catching changes have come to the Liquid Glass interface design, and they 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 how the design looks. Considering the interface uses glassy elements that can overlap and obscure items below, that’s a problem, but iOS 26.2 goes some way to fixing that – even if it’s only in a small way.
In iOS 26.2, there’s now a slider to control how transparent the clock’s digits are on your Lock Screen. Move the slider all the way to the left and the numbers go almost completely clear. Move it to the right and they become more and more opaque.
It’s a small change, but it’s an important one, as previously the time could be almost impossible to make out if it was overlaid on top of certain background images. Due to Liquid Glass’s transparency effects, images sitting behind the clock could clash with its numbers, making it very difficult to read the time.
Ongoing refinements
The move follows a similar decision from Apple in iOS 26.1, where the company added a toggle to switch the entire operating system’s Liquid Glass implementation from totally clear to a little more opaque. While this was a welcome step, it didn’t go far enough in my opinion – what Apple really needed to do was to give users a slider to control Liquid Glass as they saw fit.
Now that just such a slider has come to the Lock Screen, I’m hopeful that Apple will eventually see the light and bring this feature to the system as a whole. I don’t mind Liquid Glass itself, but it’s such a radical redesign – and with so many potential pitfalls – that users really should be able to adjust it as needed in order to avoid the kinds of legibility issues we’ve seen so far.
The Lock Screen slider is not the only way that Apple has been working on Liquid Glass in iOS 26.2. The company has also adjusted some interface animations so that they now exhibit a more fluid, water-like appearance. One example is that is opening a menu, as demonstrated by Aaron Perris on X, and this brings Liquid Glass a little closer to the animation style that Apple first previewed at WWDC 2025.
Clearly, Liquid Glass is still a work in progress, and I’d expect Apple to continue refining it over the coming weeks and months. With any luck, the company will realize that conceding a little control to users is not necessarily a bad thing. If it does, I’m hoping that a universal slider to change the transparency of Liquid Glass isn’t too far over the horizon.
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