iOS 26.1 lets you turn down liquid glass’ transparency

Apple’s latest iOS update, available for eligible devices from Monday, doesn’t introduce any major features, but it does bring one highly-requested tweak: the ability to change the transparency of the translucent liquid glass design.

If you didn’t like the look of iOS 26, all you could do so far was to reduce transparency via the accessibility settings, which pretty much turned off the liquid glass overlay. With iOS 26.1, we now get a new menu to retain the look while increasing opacity.

You can head to Settings > Display & Brightness > Liquid Glass to select either the original “Clear” option or a more opaque “Tinted” option. You can also see a preview of each option when you’re selecting them.

Liquid glass was the company’s biggest design overhaul since its move to a flat design back in 2013, but similar to most changes of this scale and significance, not everybody has been on board.

Some people said the more translucent design made various parts of the interface harder to read, including notifications or navigation controls in apps, while others professed their love for the attention to detail and the new look, which felt like a much-needed update to an interface that had grown stale over the years.

Besides the transparency settings, iOS 26.1 also lets you tweak what gestures do on the home screen: You now get an option to open the camera app by swiping to the left on the lockscreen. You change this by going to Settings > Camera > Lock Screen Swipe to Open Camera.

IOS 26.1 also gives users the ability to locally capture audio and video while recording a video call. This can be useful if you’re recording a call or podcast on the move. The company announced this feature for iPadOS in June during the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC).

The update also brings support for eight new languages for Apple Intelligence: Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Portuguese (Portugal), Vietnamese and Turkish. The company is also adding live translation support for five new languages: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Italian, Japanese and Korean.

We also get some quality of life improvements, including gestures to change songs in Apple Music; a slider to stop alarms instead of a button so you don’t accidentally shut it off; and an option to automatically install security improvements.

You can update your device by going to Settings > General > Software update.