Liquid Glass
Apple (Apple Design, Hacker News, MacRumors, Slashdot):
Apple today previewed a beautiful new software design that makes apps and system experiences more expressive and delightful while being instantly familiar. It’s crafted with a new material called Liquid Glass. This translucent material reflects and refracts its surroundings, while dynamically transforming to help bring greater focus to content, delivering a new level of vitality across controls, navigation, app icons, widgets, and more. For the very first time, the new design extends across platforms — iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26 — to establish even more harmony while maintaining the distinct qualities that make each unique.
Sebastiaan de With (Hacker News):
If you’re a designer, don’t miss the “Meet Living Glass” session on the WWDC Developer app. Incredible.
If we put aside the functionality, such as the return of the bottom toolbar in Safari, I think most of the iOS changes look pretty good. I like the icons. I like that buttons look more like buttons. The main problem is that there’s far too much transparency. I don’t know why we have to keep going through this cycle where Apple makes the text hard to read, then gradually fixes most of it, then makes it bad all over again.
Somehow, I don’t think any of this really works on macOS. The glass look just doesn’t seem to translate well. I think the sidebars and the heavily shadowed toolbars look ridiculous. I don’t like the corner radii or the icons in the menus. It’s by far the least attractive version of macOS, in my opinion, and I say that as someone who was not fond of the Big Sur redesign.
• • •
It is interesting (and bad) that after the iOS 7 and Big Sur redesigns worked to thin or eliminate borders, these new designs for iOS and macOS have the thickest, heaviest borders those platforms have ever seen. They may say it’s insets and padding and depth and shadows, but big fat borders is what they are.
I don’t understand how removing borders and chrome (in the previous redesign) and adding them back both bring “greater focus to a user’s content.”
• • •
The visionOS design language was gorgeous. This… this is something entirely different
I am not excited about the rumored iOS redesign - current iOS seems fine, and it takes @apple 3+ years to stabilize a design change and fix the papercuts they accidentally introduced by attempting to do too much.
Busywork exercise for both Apple and 3rd party devs.
Writing this because I actually like iOS, and I think the current design is strong enough to support everything the next decade years can bring, and those developer-decades are needed elsewhere …
While I’m more writer than designer these days, I was trained in the visual arts. I was always taught that clarity and legibility should be at the forefront of anyone’s mind when designing. Surely, that’s even more the case when creating an operating system for many millions of users. Yet even in Apple’s press release, linked earlier, there are multiple screenshots where key interface components are, at best, very difficult to read. That is the new foundational point for Apple design. And those screenshots will have been designed to show the best of things.
I’m a bit concerned with readability
I’m glad Google decided to heavily blur the background with Android’s Material 3 Expressive redesign.
Had they decided to make things more transparent, it would’ve looked worse! iOS 26 suffers from having too much transparency, IMO.
This might be good graphic design but I’m not convinced this is good software design. Apparently an unpopular opinion in Apple HQ: Text should be readable.
This looks awesome as long as you don’t need to read any of the text in the glass blobs with stuff behind them
can’t wait to not be able to read anything on my iPhone
First impressions of Apple‘s new design: they’re sacrificing usability for bling. And android’s new redesign looks a whole lot better.
Feels exactly like iOS 7 – way too far at first.
This is awesome! For a few minutes.
I do not want this enabled constantly on my phone though!
I love that we’re back to ‘ok but which of these toggles is on and which is off’?! in iOS
I genuinely love how much more depth iOS’ icons have now.
The Camera icon is night and day better.
So much more charm than the flat, simpler ones.
Time is a flat circle, something something.
“Thoughtfully designed groups of controls free up space for your content”
Guys we invented hamburger menus
Maybe it’s not so bad when seen on device, but from this screenshot iPadOS’ new look really pains my eye:
- the radius of sidebar & window don’t match
- the small traffic light icons just look really off next to the toolbar icon
- that icon also looks off next to the free-floating toolbar icons
• • •
This is a whole new macOS.
Apple just made a nano-texture display on its hardware to reduce the issues with using glass. Then they added all the flaws of glass back via software…
…The call is coming from inside the house! 😱
Just installed macOS Tahoe and I have very mixed feelings. It feels very cluttered, so many effects and shadows and overlays and my brain does not like it
There’s some stuff in MacOS 26 Tahoe I already don’t like, like putting needless icons next to almost every single menu item. But overall my first impression of Liquid Glass on MacOS is good too.
Check out the cool animations folders have when you drag a file over them… they open up. Then if they’re filled, the folder shows papers in them, otherwise they don’t. They also have an animation for when the file does actually move into it.
This was in Mac OS X even in the Tiger days but nice they bring back some charm. I also like these folders more than the one we previously had with Big Sur to Sequoia. They look far less childish.
The disconnect is strange: Apple keeps talking about putting the focus on content rather than chrome; but the new UI elements are literally the most prominent thing in the new design. Raised sidebar, raised toolbar buttons—aesthetically these are nice, but they’re so attention-grabbing?!
How to update your app for the new design:
cornerRadius * 5
The shadow is way too harsh.
I’m so glad my cooooonnnntteeeeeeennnnt has more room!
(which is also a lie, because they made the UI chrome like, way bigger, and added insets inside of insets inside of insets).
Because it’s just so readable!
I really hope Apple will improve the contrast of the new UI on macOS before release. Looking at Finder, f.ex., as it is right now, everything looks like it’s bleeding together - with barely identifiable boundaries between sidebar and content.
Turn on the Status Bar and Path Bar at the bottom and it looks really off, highlighting the challenges text-rich and information-dense UIs will run into when adopting the “extend content below the sidebar” concept of Liquid Glass.
I’m getting pinstripe flashbacks.
The glass look demos exactly like the first stab at Aqua did. Looking forward to everyone turning off glass in accessibility, and the default transparency getting more opaque each year like Aqua did.
Previously:
- macOS Tahoe 26 Announced
- iOS 26 Announced
- iPadOS 26 Announced
- watchOS 26 Announced
- tvOS 26 Announced
- visionOS 26 Announced
- WWDC 2025 Keynote
- Rumored Redesign in iOS 19 and macOS 16
Update (2025-06-11): Linda Dong:
Here are the tools we’ve got for you to design with Liquid Glass and the new design system.
Xor:
I am a graphics programmer, and here’s my feedback on Apple’s Liquid Glass beta. The idea is cool, but it’s difficult to work with from a UX perspective.
Shiny things always look great at the store, and this looks like it was designed to look sexy at the Apple Store. It’s an obvious artifact of the Alan Dye UI design factory, with an obsession for how things look (in UI mockups) rather than how they work (in the real world).
Unfortunately, I strongly disagree with the design choices that Alan Dye, and his team, have made with Liquid Glass. Some of it is the material quality of the elements, but a large part of my disagreement is the construction and arrangement of the elements themselves.
juan:
i can’t believe apple shipped the UI microsoft only ever shows in their ads
Yes, folks, I too hope that Apple will dial down the orgy of glass effects and transparency in future betas, but Jesus Fucking Christ this is not a 2-year-old startup. This is one of the richest companies in the world, with resources and (supposedly) 40+ years of experience in UI/UX design. Has nobody at Apple — at any stage of design development — noticed all the issues we’ve been noticing since the Liquid Glass reveal yesterday? And if they have and greenlit them, isn’t that worrying?
It’s especially egregious because Sure, this is the first dev beta. But it’s also 30 days before a public beta. Considering their cadence for releasing a new OS every year (ugh), they really can’t just pop something like this out in a half-baked state, as there are fundamental issues with the premise that need to be fixed… and won’t be before it ships ‘for real’.
All the legibility stuff is not a bug. It’s literally the design language. Look at this logo. White on white. This is what they’re going for. They didn’t repeatedly choose the worst background combo to show stuff, they chose each and every one of those. I think they’re actually really into this.
It was the same with iOS 7, and IMO that set back the industry for years working on redesigns rather than new features, and almost every single app looked worse after the transition
Ever since iOS 7 I can’t watch Apple’s design videos without thinking they are built from a completely incorrect starting premise and goals.
“UI gets out of the way of your content”
”hides when not needed”
”only appears when the user needs them”The details hardly matter when listening it feels like all of this has completely the wrong goals from the start.
I feel like Liquid Glass is another iPhone first design that is being shoe-horned onto iPad and Mac. Its core showy feature is the dynamic highlight, which only makes sense on a device you hold in your hand and moves around a lot.
What has surprised me this year is the number of times I’ve seen people encouraging others to hold their complaints until Apple finalizes the <platform>OS 26 releases in the fall.
“Things will change, these are not the final designs! Just wait,” they’ve been saying.
I’m telling you, unequivocally, that these people are wrong.
Now is the time to tell the folks at Apple where their design needs improvement. Their operating systems are in the earliest of early betas, when feedback is both expected and appreciated. This is when large changes to the way things look will be possible. In fact, now is probably the only time this will be possible for many design decisions.
[…]
While I agree that people should use the official route to submit suggestions and bug reports, I have had far better luck in resolving issues when I’ve been vocal about them on social media.
It’s interesting that people are claiming “It’s just a beta” and at the same time celebrating left-aligned text in alerts, where the centered text was introduced FIVE YEARS AGO.
There’s a lot of faith in Apple changing course, but my god, how long does that take?
Anyway, most of the crap from Big Sur is still here. When do we get back enabled keyboard shortcuts in menus?
Update (2025-06-12): Juli Clover:
Apple has multiple Accessibility options that are designed to customize iOS for different visual needs, and one of these options is Reduce Transparency. Toggling on Reduce Transparency adds a darker background to translucent areas like the Control Center, app icons, and app folders, improving contrast.
My biggest issue with Liquid Glass isn’t the lensing or the contrast, it’s that the layering just doesn’t make any sense. The design elevates the visual z order of layers almost in reverse order to how they’re actually placed down in the app. Sliders, tabs and segmented controls lift up even further than that on touch, and turn to liquid (for some reason), then drop back down when you let go
They keep saying their goal is to “elevate your content” but this design does the literal opposite. On macOS, the “chrome” casts deep shadows over your content. It’s weird.
I just fundamentally feel that overlaying chrome on content rarely really succeeds in deferring to the content, but instead interrupts it, and is often harder to tune out. Translucency can only reduce the overall perception of conflict in the scene, and the legibility and contrast issues have not really been solved. (Transient controls are the main exception that I can think of, which I don’t need to be translucent.) I guess many people are more bothered by dedicated control/nav space than I am.
Why does it seem to be so hard for Apple to realize that translucency is making things harder to read? In these images promoting Liquid Glass, it’s obvious to me that the light text on the left is made harder to read by the blurry light-coloured dog leg visible underneath it, and that the dark text in the address bar on the right is made harder to read by the blurry dark-coloured flower arrangement visible underneath it.
Are we just all resigned to our eye-straining fate as users at this point?
New camera icon is a huge improvement.
A lot of chat about contrast issues distracts from other changes that are worth discussing. E.G here they removed all the separators between items and decreased font size, and perceptively I feel less confident that I can tap on the right one.
The background for the “Search” field does not look like “glass”, liquid or otherwise. It just looks like blurry splotches that make the gray text harder to read.
The “Search” field doesn’t look like a field at all. It just looks like what Apple over the years has FORCED us to see as a field — except that it’s even worse now.
To top it all off, the “field” makes the text and icon below/“underneath” it blurry as well.
Those notifications look like transparent stickers applied over a window pane. The distance between background and foreground elements appears minimal exactly because these are glass effects with too much transparency and very little opacity and contrast. The separation is very faint.
In iOS 6, depth was achieved through ‘material’ textures and by visibly blurring or obscuring the elements that had to lose focus, in a sort of exaggerated camera depth-of-field effect. Look what happens when I select a folder in iOS 6 — you can clearly see what’s in focus and what is not. You can easily distinguish the hierarchy of layers. You can perceive depth. It’s almost tangible.
In Mac OS, Liquid Glass does an even worse job at conveying depth. For starters, Finder windows look amorphous, the differentiation between active (in focus) and inactive (not in focus) windows is barely noticeable, and some details are still rough around the edges (no pun intended)[…]
[…]
The visual hierarchy is muddled: why have a seemingly 3D toolbar, but the three semaphore controls on the left keep being flat and 2D? Here, it seems that the sidebar area of the window is flat, and the area on the right with the toolbar and the window’s contents is 3D and layered, while the area on the far right, with the additional info on the selected item, has thin layers that make it appear as a sort of intermediate state between 2D and 3D[…]
Can we please have the macOS X Lion UI back? 😍
This post has a lot of likes.
I still do not understand why these sidebars are floating on macOS Tahoe.
It really doesn’t add anything other than arbitrary discontinuities and weird banding problems.
Podcasts and Music on macOS 26 are a pretty extreme indicator of where this design is going. Relevant to me, of course, because my own @broadcastsapp strived to match the system Podcasts app from day one, six years ago. But now? 😅 It’s impossible not to look at some of the Liquid Glass experiences in macOS and worry
Want to disable liquid glass and bring back the old menubar in macOS Tahoe?
Liquid Glass, in Apple’s 2026 operating systems, feels like an attempt to reassert control over third-party app branding — forcing others to become a subset of the larger iOS brand and look and feel.
It also strikes me as a defense against the continued growth of cross-platform frameworks by furthering the distance between what’s a “real” iOS app versus a cross-platform app — or even against apps that try to meet in the middle of both platforms design-wise. It will be more challenging to build an app that feels at home on iOS with limited development and design budgets.
Put another way: three days after the WWDC keynote, Liquid Glass feels just as much a strategic business move as it does a design solution
in search of a problem.
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https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/219/
In that video at 18:10 they show what it looks like with Accessibility features turned on to reduce transparency and increase the background blur.
I will definitely be turning on Reduce Transparency and Reduce Motion (like I already do with iOS 18). The default UI looks horrendous and the new animation effects are pointless.
"Please add more transparency so everything is harder to read. And while you're at it, add more animations so that it takes longer to accomplish tasks." -- said nobody ever?
I fear we are now in the era where too many young UI designers have never actually experienced great UI -- they grew up when everything was already enshittified. I've noticed we're on our way to losing keyboard shortcuts too. Sad to see Apple give in to this mediocrity.
This whole thing is an absolute travesty. Who keeps wanting to make menu bars invisible? Who keeps wanting to make Safari’s controls needlessly hard to use? Why does no one learn the lessons from THREE and FOUR years ago? Yes, it’s a beta, yes they’ll roll some of this back this year and more so in years to come. But why do the geniuses at this company constantly show such poor taste at stage one? Why are solved problems unsolved again?
Can we eject Apple's entire software design team into the sun? Seriously, every large change they have made for years has made things worse. Please include the hardware designer responsible for the macOS notch while we are at it.
Even in Apple's session video trying to show off the new design it looks like garbage.
Designers are perennially hard to manage.
Yielding decorative slack – later retrieved when customers protest a loss of legibility and ergonomics – is a symptom of managerial distraction.
@Ben and with those settings turned on it looks...exactly like iOS 7!
You're absolutely right about the new generation of programmers and designers and for that matter project managers apparently. The young ones now have never known a world that wasn't enshittified like this.
People worry about AI feeding AI and it becoming a downward spiral, well people are already doing it. Garbage design feeding garbage design.
People already are glued to apps that have unremovable interface elements plastered all over the place and don't seem to mind. This "getting out of the way of the content" thing is just another line. They don't actually know what it means, it's just a buzz-phrase.
I love that Apple has managed to essentially re-introduce the same design style they introduced 25 years ago with Alan Dye presenting it as some insightful design revelation. Sure – a lot of UI is fashion – and fashion is cyclical, but still.
What's another material that has pretty much the same properties as 'Liquid Glass'?
Perhaps water?
What's another term for water?
Liquid Glass = Water = Aqua
Which is fine as Aqua was quite innovative when it was first introduced. Just let's not pretend that it's something novel in the realm of GUIs.
@Matthew
I was thinking the same thing when their introduction video literally showed video of water and talked about the properties of water. It almost felt like a joke. The name Liquid Glass feels sort of awkward, like they were trying really hard *not* to call Aqua, Aqua
My favorite wwdc quote (I paraphrase)“liquid glass functions like glass in the real world”
Oh yea? Is it like looking out a window without letting the rain and bugs in your house? Or is it more like an artificial glare that makes text hard to read?
I mean it could maybe be tolerable if they tone down the transparency or I guess just use a dark wallpaper. Make the icons transparent! You don’t need to look at them anyway! Who cares about apps just look at your gorgeous wallpaper.
I just watched the "Design Icons for Liquid Glass" video and nice of them to do Figma templates. But is there a way to preview what it will look like with all the cool effects?
I think this new redesign looks fun. It's too easy to get caught up in the negative echo-chamber every time they try something different. I mean, come on, what if we just tried to enjoy new designs and changes when they came along? Seems to me that the negativity about Liquid Glass shows more about the mindset of the community than it does about the design.
@Jonathan it says the community likes to be able to read text.
I agree, it looks fun. It looks pretty. But it looks so fun, so pretty, it makes me wonder if they actually tried to use it in the real world.
As someone famous once said, great design isn't just how something looks, it's how it works.
The new UI elements look cool and futuristic, but also extremely distracting. I will most likely be looking into how to tone down the effects on my devices.
