Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac:

Well, iOS 26.1 beta 4 is now available, and it introduces a new option to choose a more opaque look for Liquid Glass. The same option is also available on Mac and iPad.

You can find the new option on iPhone and iPad by going to the Settings app and navigating to the Display & Brightness menu. On the Mac, it’s available in the “Appearance” menu in System Settings. Here, you’ll see a new Liquid Glass menu with “Clear” and “Tinted” options.

“Choose your preferred look for Liquid Glass. Clear is more transparent, revealing the content beneath. Tinted increases opacity and adds more contrast,” Apple explains.

This addresses perhaps the biggest complaint people, both online and in person, have with the Liquid Glass design: it’s just too transparent. I enjoy the transparency and think it adds some whimsy to the operating systems, but to each their own. Welcome back, iOS 18, but uglier. The Tinted option is more of a halfway point between the full-on Reduce Transparency option in Settings → Accessibility and the complete Liquid Glass look, and I surmise most people will use it as a way to “turn off” the new design.

I wrote about Liquid Glass’s readability issues in the summer, and while Apple has addressed some of them, it still needs work in some places. (Apply Betteridge’s law of headlines.) For those who are especially perturbed by those inconsistencies and abnormalities, this is a good stopgap solution. Is it an admission from Apple that the new design is objectively a failure? Of course not, but it’s also the first time I’ve seen Apple provide this much user customization to something it hailed as a new paradigm in interface design. There was no “skeuomorphism switch” in iOS 7, for example.

But Apple also wasn’t as large as it is now, and people are naturally adverse to change. Maybe even Apple employees who have been living with the feature on their personal devices for the past few months. While awkward, it isn’t totally out of the blue, and while I won’t enable the Tinted mode myself, I’m sure many others will. And by no means should this be a reason for Apple to stop iterating on Liquid Glass — it’s far from finished, and I hope iOS 27 is a bug fix release that addresses the major design problems the redesign has given way to.

Also in iOS 26.1: Slide to Unlock makes a comeback in the alarm screen, which I think is whimsical and a clever solution to accidental dismissals.