With the launch of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 26 around the corner, I’d like to shed some light on how I see things moving forward with Apple’s new operating systems.

Over the summer, some users contacted me asking whether RailControl Pro would still work reliably on their devices if they installed the iOS 26 beta. Even though I tested the app and didn’t find issues, I advised against it for two reasons.

First, installing betas is usually not a good idea if your main device contains data you don’t want to lose, or if you rely on apps that might break. I learned this the hard way myself when I installed the Mac OS X Tiger beta 1 on my Mac as a teenager.

The second reason is more concerning, and also the reason I’ve written this blog post. Some of Apple’s design choices and implementations with Liquid Glass are very questionable and, in many cases, barely functional. Animations are slow or broken, and text is sometimes hard to read. These are fixable issues, but I had hoped Apple would make progress over the summer. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened. Especially on macOS, many problems remain unresolved. Some are so serious that they can’t realistically be fixed by third-party developers, or at least not within a reasonable timeframe. These issues make their apps appear broken when, in fact, it’s the OS and its APIs that aren’t working as they should.

Because of this, I’ve decided not to invest any effort into adopting the Liquid Glass UI for RailControl Pro for now. Apple must have foreseen that many developers would face these challenges, as this year they introduced a compatibility mode for apps. This allows apps to run with the previous UI, even on devices with iOS 26. Let’s hope the state of Apple’s operating systems improves in the coming months. If it does, I’ll be more than happy to adopt the new style in RailControl Pro as well. Until then, RailControl Pro will look exactly as it does today, even on upgraded devices.

In the meantime, I’ve resumed work on RailControl Pro. A bug-fix update has just been released, and a larger update with new features requested by some of you is already in the works.