iPadOS 27.0.1 on M5 iPad Pro — Clear Liquid Glass icons cause severe animation stuttering, plus other UI issues
Has anyone else experienced these issues with iPadOS 27 / 27.0.1 on an M5 iPad Pro?
I’ve noticed several unusual animation and performance issues since updating to iPadOS 27. These problems first appeared with iPadOS 27 and have still not been fixed in iPadOS 27.0.1.
Clear Liquid Glass icons cause severe animation stuttering
When I set my Home Screen app icons to Clear, the entire UI becomes noticeably less smooth. The biggest differences are visible when rotating the iPad, opening and closing apps, and performing Home Screen or other system transitions.
The animation doesn’t just feel slightly slower. It becomes noticeably stuttery, snappy, and inconsistent, which is particularly obvious on an iPad Pro with ProMotion.
What makes this especially interesting is how directly the problem changes with the icon appearance. Clear icons cause severe stuttering, Tinted icons are somewhat better but still noticeably affected, while Normal and Dark icons are smooth.
If I switch from Clear to Normal or Dark, the animations immediately return to being smooth.
This makes it seem strongly connected to the way the Clear/Tinted Liquid Glass icons are being rendered or composited rather than being a general performance problem with the iPad.
I’ve tested this repeatedly, and the difference is very easy to reproduce. Simply setting the icons to Clear and rotating the iPad or opening and closing apps produces the stuttering. Changing the icons back to Normal or Dark immediately restores the smooth animations.
This issue appeared with iPadOS 27 and is still present in iPadOS 27.0.1.
Control Center connectivity panel has an abnormal animation
I’ve also noticed an issue with the square connectivity section of Control Center containing Wi-Fi, Airplane Mode, AirDrop, Bluetooth, VPN, Cellular, etc.
The opening and closing animation sometimes looks abnormal. I wouldn’t describe this simply as low FPS or lag. The transition can look incomplete, almost as though part of the animation isn’t being rendered or doesn’t properly finish.
It gives the impression that the transition itself is visually broken rather than simply running at a lower frame rate.
This also started with iPadOS 27 and remains present in iPadOS 27.0.1.
A normal Lock Screen wallpaper can occasionally break the wake animation
Another strange issue I’ve encountered involves the Lock Screen wallpaper.
On a few occasions, a completely normal, ordinary-resolution photograph used as my Lock Screen wallpaper somehow caused the screen-wake animation to become extremely stuttery and abrupt.
To be clear, this wasn’t some huge 4K/8K image, unusually large file, complicated animation, or visually demanding wallpaper. It was simply a normal picture.
When the problem occurred, the wake animation itself was noticeably broken and stuttery rather than smoothly transitioning from the display being off to the Lock Screen.
Interestingly, deleting the affected Lock Screen wallpaper and creating it again fixed the problem.
This issue also appeared with iPadOS 27 and can still occur on iPadOS 27.0.1.
Battery consumption seems somewhat higher
I’ve also noticed that battery consumption seems somewhat higher since updating to iPadOS 27 compared with similar usage before the update.
This isn’t something I can measure as precisely as the animation problems, but the difference has remained noticeable even after the initial period following the update. It therefore doesn’t seem to be limited to the immediate post-update period.
Has anyone else experienced these issues on an M5 iPad Pro or another iPad running iPadOS 27/27.0.1?
In particular, I’m interested in whether anyone else has experienced the Clear icon → severe animation stuttering issue and whether you’ve found a workaround that actually restores smooth animations while keeping Clear icons enabled.
iPad Pro, iPadOS 27
