- Apple’s iOS 26.2 update includes 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 released beta versions for iOS 26.2, and the latest beta 1 and beta 2 updates have added a few interesting new features to the mix. Some of the most noticeable 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 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. Given that the interface uses glassy elements that can overlap and hide elements below, that’s a problem, but iOS 26.2 solves it somehow—albeit only in a small part.
In iOS 26.2, there is now a slider to control how transparent the clock digits are on your lock screen. Move the slider all the way to the left and the numbers become almost completely clear. Move it to the right and they become more and more opaque.
It’s a small change, but it’s important, as previously the time could be almost impossible to see if it was superimposed on certain background images. Due to the transparency effects of Liquid Glass, images sitting behind the watch can collide with its numbers, making it very difficult to read the time.
Ongoing improvements
The move follows a similar decision by Apple in iOS 26.1, where the company added a toggle to switch the entire operating system’s Liquid Glass implementation from completely clear to slightly more opaque. While this was a welcome step, it didn’t go far enough in my opinion – what Apple really needed to do was 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 hope that Apple will eventually see the light and bring this feature to the system as a whole. I don’t mind Liquid Glass per se, but it’s such a radical redesign – and with so many potential pitfalls – that users really should be able to tweak it as needed to avoid the kind of readability issues we’ve seen so far.
The lock screen slider isn’t the only way Apple has worked on Liquid Glass in iOS 26.2. The company has also adjusted some interface animations so that they now display a more fluid, water-like appearance. One example is opening a menu, as demonstrated by Aaron Perris at X, and this brings Liquid Glass a bit closer to the animation style that Apple first showed off at WWDC 2025.
Clearly, Liquid Glass is still a work in progress, and I expect Apple to continue to refine it over the coming weeks and months. With any luck, the company will realize that giving users a little control isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If it does, I hope a universal slider to change the transparency of Liquid Glass isn’t too far over the horizon.
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