iOS 26.1 lets you reduce the transparency of Liquid Glass

Apple’s latest iOS update, available to eligible devices starting Monday, doesn’t offer any major features, but it does offer one much-requested tweak: the ability to change the transparency of the transparent liquid glass design.

If you don’t like the look of iOS 26, all you can do so far is reduce transparency via Accessibility settings, which has pretty much turned off the liquid glass overlay. With iOS 26.1, we now get a new menu to preserve the theme with increased opacity.

You can head to Settings > Display & brightness > Liquid Glass To select the original “Clear” option or a more opaque “Colored” option. You can also see a preview of each option when you select it.

Liquid glass was the company’s biggest design overhaul since its move to flat design in 2013, but like most changes of this size and significance, not everyone was on board.

Some people said the more transparent design made different parts of the interface more difficult to read, including notifications or app navigation controls, while others declared they loved the attention to detail and the new look, which seemed like a much-needed refresh 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 the option to open the Camera app by swiping left on the Lock screen. You can change this by going to Settings > Camera > Lock screen, swipe to open Camera.

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

The update also brings support for eight new Apple Intelligence languages: 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 turn off alerts instead of a button so you don’t accidentally turn it off; And an option to install security improvements automatically.

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