Consistency

Right around the time when the multitouch trackpad was announced, Apple introduced natural scroll. Natural scroll reversed scroll behaviour (move content instead of viewport) and set it to default while offered a setting so you can change it back if you want. Importantly, that setting affects all scroll behavior in macOS, which of course it should.

Enter iOS 26 beta 1 and its new UI, including its new camera app design. Instead of picking camera mode by sliding it into the middle like before, you move along a sliding tab bar with a highlighting piece of glass UI. It reversed the behaviour from before and took some getting used to. But with beta 2, they reversed course. Now you manipulate the tab bar behind the glass piece. While it mimics the original camera app more closely, it creates an issue because the glass highlighter isn't abstract, it's very much something on top of the different modes. So now you're moving something that is positioned below something while interacting above it, on a UI element that is not interactive, which is definitely not intuitive. And it get's worse by the fact that if you look at the tab bar in Safari, or any app with the new glass tab bar, it does the opposite. So you have two tab bars with glass highlighting your selection that operates in two different ways. That's a mess.

With a recent beta, they also included an option to toggle how you want the behaviour in the camera app, but unfortunately it defaults to the non-consistent one. And adding settings for such obscure things? That is distinctively non-Apple. Decide what's best and stick to it. I hope this part sees some improvement in the coming betas or later.

This is just one small thing in a new design language that is objectively problematic in so many ways. Subjectively, I just think it looks really bad.