How to Undo Your iPhone's New Look After iOS 26

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How to Undo Your iPhone's New Look After iOS 26

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Apple’s iOS 26 comes out today, and with it, a new design language called Liquid Glass. While the iPhone home screen has looked more or less the same ever since Apple ditched skeuomorphism in 2013, when you open up your phone today, after downloading the company’s latest update, you might be in for a surprise. Apple’s new look for the iPhone prioritizes transparency, and not everyone’s a fan.

Luckily, if you don’t like Liquid Glass, there’s something you can do about it. You can’t get rid of it entirely, but here’s how to make your iPhone look as close as possible to how it used to look before, across both the homescreen and apps like Safari.

What is Liquid Glass?

First, know thine enemy. If you ever used Windows Vista back in the day, you have an idea of what you’re facing here. That operating system was famous for adding transparency effects to Windows that drastically affected performance, and while the iPhone seems to have saved itself from any performance issues with its own update, the goal seems to be the same: let you see what’s below your buttons and overlays by blurring and obscuring your background before letting it bleed through.

In theory, this adds a bit of depth to your display, and might make it easier to understand how your various screen elements exist in relation to each other. But in practice, some have complained about it being distracting, flooding your screen with irrelevant information you can’t do anything with.

Apple’s actually addressed these complaints a bit throughout the iOS 26 beta, specifically making the Control Center look less busy. But it’s still moving forward with the design changes overall.

How to "fix" Liquid Glass

   

                   
           

           

                           
                                        Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt
                   

   

If you’d rather Apple leave your iPhone’s design alone, though, you have options. During the beta, users discovered a pre-existing accessibility control within iOS that also, seemingly, neuters most of Liquid Glass’ changes. It won’t get rid of all of the updates—the new, wider toggle button is unaffected, for instance—but it goes a long way towards restoring your phone to how it looked before. 

Called Reduce Transparency, this control has been around for years, and was originally intended as a way to add a solid background to any pre-Liquid Glass elements that already had transparent or blurred backgrounds, like the Passcode entry screen. Now, though, it turns out it also affects Liquid Glass as a whole.

You can see the changes here. Notice how the play button on Apple Music no longer lets blurred album artwork bleed into it, allowing you to more clearly read the artist’s name?

While I haven’t gotten my hands on Liquid Glass yet, I think I’ll be turning this on right away. I like big, chunky buttons, and Reduce Transparency seems like the way to get just that, even as Apple insists transparency is the future. If that sounds like you, here’s where you can turn it on:

Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size.

And while it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with Liquid Glass, while you’re in your accessibility controls, you might also want to turn on the Increase Contrast option, which will make your apps’ foreground elements pop from the background a bit more. After turning this on, you’ll see it right away on the Settings page’s toggles, which will take on a darker shade of gray when disabled. This is optional, but helps add to the chunky buttons look, and brings back a little bit of the depth Liquid Glass is going for, without making your screen busier.

Bring back the old Safari URL bar

   

                   
           

           

                           
                                        Credit: Pranay Parab
                   

   

For the most part, once you’ve enabled “Reduce Transparency,” you’ve gotten rid of Liquid Glass’ most extreme design decisions. Technically, the update does also allow you to make your icons clear or adjust your lock screen widgets, but those changes have to be opted into. However, one important app will look pretty drastically different by default: Safari.

When you open Safari after installing iOS 26, you’ll notice that the URL bar is now just a small pill at the bottom of the screen, next to a tiny back button and an even smaller refresh button. All your other old navigation features are instead hidden away in either the three-dots menu, or behind various swipes and long presses.

Personally, some of us at Lifehacker think the smaller address bar is worth it, but if you want to go back to the old URL bar, you can do that. Simply navigate to Settings > Apps > Safari. Under the Tabs section, you’ll see three layout options. Compact is the new default, but Bottom will bring back the old look, with full controls for back, forward, sharing, bookmarks, and tabs all laid out below the address. There’s also a new Top option, if you’d like, that moves the website address to the top of the screen but leaves navigation at the bottom.

Source: How to Undo Your iPhone's New Look After iOS 26