Apple's iOS 27 Beta Lets You Crank Up Liquid Glass Transparency — Here's What It's Like

Apple's Liquid Glass design language has been a defining visual feature of its mobile operating system since it debuted in 2025. Now, with the iOS 27 public beta released in mid-July, the company is handing users a new degree of control over just how transparent that glassy interface can be. A full release is expected in September.

A New Slider for Liquid Glass Transparency

When Liquid Glass first launched, it drew mixed reactions. Some users praised the aesthetic ambition, while others flagged concerns about text legibility behind translucent layers. Apple responded by pushing updates that increased opacity across the interface. With iOS 27, the company is now offering a slider that lets users move in the opposite direction — toward even greater transparency than the default.

The setting lives in the Appearance tab within Settings. Tapping on Liquid Glass reveals a slider that can be dragged to the left for a more transparent look or to the right to boost opacity. The existing options to Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast remain available as well, ensuring that users who need a more opaque interface for accessibility reasons are still accommodated.

Living With Maximum Clarity for a Week

After installing the public beta, one user cranked the transparency to its maximum "more clear" setting and left it on for a full week. The experience revealed a design language that, at its most transparent, produces a distinctive visual effect: notifications warping the colors and shapes of app icons behind them, and text in menu bars refracting as content scrolls beneath.

While scrolling through Slack messages early in the testing period, the names of chat rooms visible behind the bottom menu bar curled and distorted before settling back into readable text on the other side. The effect felt increasingly whimsical the longer one observed it — a reminder of the design risk Apple took with its glassy aesthetic.

The "more clear" option also introduced a heightened sense of depth. The experience drew comparisons to a feature from more than a decade ago: the parallax wallpaper effect introduced in iOS 7 during the iPhone 5 era. That effect used the device's gyroscope to make app icons appear as though they floated slightly above the background, shifting with the phone's tilt. Both Liquid Glass and those 3D app icons gave the iPhone a more tactile, dimensional feel.

Former WIRED staff member Mat Honan described the iOS 7 redesign by noting that translucency, parallax, animation, and motion — such as a weather app showing falling snow — gave the system "a dive-in quality that it didn't have before" and made it "appear three-dimensional in some ways." A similar dive-in quality emerged when Liquid Glass transparency was pushed to its maximum in iOS 27.

Surprisingly Easy to Live With

By the midpoint of the week-long test, the heightened transparency had begun to feel so normal that it prompted a check of the settings to confirm the "more clear" option was still active. It was — a sign of how quickly the eye can adapt to even the most distinctive interface choices.

In practice, the most pronounced glassy effects tended to appear in menu bars and smaller interface elements near the edges of the screen. As a result, the legibility of primary content was rarely affected. The warping of words and colors often registered only in peripheral vision during regular use, making the effect easy to ignore most of the time.

The transparency toggle is not the most dramatic change in the iOS 27 beta — that distinction may belong to the Siri assistant overhaul — but it offers a meaningful customization option for users who want their device to lean into its visual design rather than strictly prioritize utility. For some, a smartphone that occasionally functions as a piece of interactive art is a welcome trade-off.

After the week-long experiment concluded, the transparent setting remained in place. Whether other users will share that enthusiasm when iOS 27 reaches its full release in September remains to be seen, but the slider ensures that everyone can find their own balance between clarity and opacity.

Have you tried the iOS 27 beta yet? Share this article with friends and let us know which Liquid Glass setting you prefer — maximum transparency, full opacity, or somewhere in between.

Source: Wired