If you set Liquid Glass to the more opaque mode in settings I find iOS usability to be fine now, and some non-flashy changes such as moving search bars to the bottom are good UX improvements.

The real stinker with Liquid Glass has been macOS. You get a half-baked version of the design that barely even looks good and hurts usability.

Still takes multiple taps to find something on a page in Safari.

You can restore the old UI by changing the “tabs” setting from “compact” to “top” or “bottom”.

You can just type the text to find in the address bar — “find on page” will be the at the very bottom of the list of suggestions.

This is, again, something you can fix in Settings

iOS 26 is a disaster on devices with 4GB RAM though, so I'm not upgrading my iPhone 13 Mini again (that was a traumatic few days).

Interesting. I haven't had any noticable problems on my 13 Mini.

What are you seeing?

Are you sure that wasn't just a beta thing?

Imagine running iOS 26 on an iPad Air 3 from 2019…

Apple released iOS 18.7.5:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/126347

18.7.3 and newer are not published for most devices that support them in order to coerce people to move to 26.x

That's terrible.

Available for: iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR, iPad 7th generation

It's a rug-pull going against the tradition of supporting the most recent 2 OS versions until the autumn refresh simply to technofascistly force users onto 26 with an artificially-created Hobson's false choice between security and usability. This is bullshit.

No.

They have been doing this every year for the past several years: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/19/ios-18-forced-ios-26-up...

It's being noticed just now because iOS 26 has controversial UI/UX and many users don't want to update.

I'll never understand how people actually believe that their refusal to adapt, and refusal opening them up to harm, is ever not their own fault

You're choosing to not have the update. And that's fine- own it.