Apple has added a control in the iOS 27 public beta that lets iPhone users decide how transparent its Liquid Glass interface should be. That is useful because Liquid Glass has been the rare interface redesign that can make a notification look pretty while also making some users wonder who approved the legibility trade-off.
According to WIRED’s Reece Rogers, the iOS 27 public beta arrived in mid-July, with the full software release expected in September. The beta includes a new Liquid Glass slider inside Settings, under Appearance. Tapping Liquid Glass opens a control that can be dragged left for a more see-through interface or right for a more opaque one.
Apple has not removed the existing accessibility-style options Rogers noted: Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast are still available. That matters for users who found Apple’s glass effect harder to read, and for anyone who would rather their phone’s menus behave less like decorative aquarium panels.
What the setting changes
Liquid Glass is Apple’s translucent system design, introduced in 2025. Rogers reported that it divided users and designers at launch, with criticism focused partly on how the effect could hurt text readability. Apple later changed the effect through updates that made parts of the iPhone interface more opaque.
In iOS 27, Apple is moving from one broad design judgment to a user-adjustable knob. Rogers tested the beta for a week with the slider set to its clearest position. He described notifications as glassy panels that distort app icons behind them, and menu bars that bend colors and text underneath as the user scrolls.
The mechanism is visual rather than complicated: foreground interface elements let background content show through, then apply a refraction-like distortion. In Rogers’ testing, the effect appeared most often around notifications, bottom menu bars, and smaller controls near the edges of the display. He wrote that the main text he was trying to read was rarely affected during normal use.
Rogers also reported seeing the effect in Slack, where room names warped behind the menu bar, turning into curved lines before becoming readable again after scrolling past the transparent layer. That sounds charming if you like interface flourish, and irritating if your tolerance for decorative distortion ended somewhere around skeuomorphic felt.
A callback to iOS 7
Rogers compared the clearer Liquid Glass setting to Apple’s iOS 7 parallax wallpaper effect, which used the iPhone’s gyroscope to make home-screen icons appear to float above the background as the device tilted. That feature arrived during the iPhone 5 era and gave the operating system a sense of depth without changing the app grid’s basic function.
Former WIRED staffer Mat Honan wrote at the time of the iOS 7 redesign that translucency, parallax, animation, and motion gave the system a “dive-in quality” and made parts of it seem three-dimensional. Rogers said the iOS 27 transparency setting produced a similar sense of depth during his testing.
The new Liquid Glass control is not the largest change in the iOS 27 beta. Rogers identified Apple’s Siri overhaul as the more conspicuous update. Still, the slider is a notable design retreat from one-size-fits-all taste. Apple is letting users choose whether Liquid Glass should be mostly utility, mostly visual texture, or something in between.
For now, the setting is part of beta software, so its behavior could change before the expected September release. The confirmed change is narrower: Apple’s designers made Liquid Glass adjustable, and iPhone users in the public beta can already push the interface toward clearer glass or safer opacity.
This story draws on original reporting from WIRED.
