Apple, Are You Good?

Since the infamous iOS 7 release, I have had Reduce Motion and Reduce Transparency active on my iPhones. I simply never liked the zoom animations and the low contrast graphics. Which was and is totally fine. That's why there are accessibility settings to alter those things. So the options were there and worked perfectly well. But since the iOS 26 release, things have gone wild.

To be fair, if you do NOT care or bother too much about customization with accessibility settings, things look seemingly fine. In the following screencast, you can see two folder animations with Light Mode and no accessibility setting enabled.

But now have a look at the folder animation when Reduce Motion and Reduce Transparency are both active in Dark Mode.

Be aware that this was captured with the 26.1 update. It was even worse with the initial release. Things that are off (you might have to look at the second video frame by frame):

• The folder fades in with a transparency – I thought I had turned that off?!
• Icons go dark for a single frame – Ok?
• The status bar and folder on the desktop disappear – Erm?
• The complete screen goes dark – But why?

I don't really know what is up at Apple, especially the iOS and Siri departments. Both seem to struggle. The hardware is as awesome as ever before, but the operating system, the thing I initially fell in love with Apple more than 15 years ago, is losing its polish and sense of magic that once set it apart…I sincerely hope Apple will recover from those annoyances and start to feel fine again.