By reducing motion effects and tinkering with the Liquid Glass functionality on your older iPhone, you can reduce sluggishness while operating in iOS 26.
Apple gave iOS a massive redesign this year, unveiling the new Liquid Glass experience at WWDC 2025 in June. Liquid Glass brings translucency and light effects to various menus, toggles, buttons, and other user interface elements on the iPhone as soon as you update to iOS 26. The effect is amazing in theory. In practice, Liquid Glass has drawn criticism since June, when Apple unveiled the first iOS 26 beta release. Initially, users had problems with the Liquid Glass transparency that made notifications and menu items harder to read. Apple has tweaked the Liquid Glass experience over the summer, and continued to improve Liquid Glass customizations since iOS 26’s official launch in mid-September. While legibility issues have been largely fixed, some iPhone users still complained online about iOS 26. It wasn’t just the unusual Liquid Glass look. Owners of older iPhones who upgraded to iOS 26 soon discovered that the new operating system was slowing their handsets down.
As a reminder, Apple usually makes its latest iOS version available to several iPhone generations, including older handsets, as soon as the software is ready to roll out. For iOS 26, that makes the iPhone 11 series, released in 2019, the oldest iPhone models that can experience the Liquid Glass UI — including any associated performance issues. The good news is that there are ways to improve the performance of old iPhones that run iOS 26. The bad news is that there’s currently no way to permanently remove the Liquid Glass design or downgrade to iOS 18, the previous operating system version.How to speed up an old iPhone running iOS 26
The Liquid Glass experience offers rich visual effects.
