Assorted Notes on Liquid Glass
I’ve been trying to make sense of Apple’s latest user-interface redesign — Apple calls it Liquid Glass — that will affect all their platforms in the next iteration of their respective OS versions. But it’s hard to make sense of it when, after checking Apple’s own guidance, I’m mostly left with the feeling that at Apple they’re making things up as they go.
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Now take a look at the area I’ve highlighted in the image. Why would you want to “focus on the underlying content” here? Tab bars and toolbars still cover the underlying content, and the more transparent/translucent they are, the worse. When something fades to the background, it literally ceases to be in the foreground, so there’s no point in focusing on it. This is like proposing an interface that helps you focus your sight on your peripheral vision.
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Another thing that irks me about this obsession with icon simplification is that when you abstract things this much, you dilute their meaning instead of distilling it. Take the progressive degradation of the Dictionary icon, for example. In its subsequent iterations (as soon as it loses the ‘book’ shape), it could just be the icon for a font managing app. Because it ends up losing a lot (if not all) of its uniqueness.
People really expected Apple to shift back toward the kinds of things that made us all fall in love with their platforms and products to begin with. […] But the pendulum never swung back. Instead, we got Liquid Glass.
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And so it seems to me that the people who spearheaded both iOS 7 (2013) and iOS 26 (2025) either did not understand that the visually-rich style from 2001–2013 played such a significant role in Apple’s success or they simply did not care that it did.
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Yet as years go by, we seem to lose more of OS X’s good things. Year after year, draggable borders and frames became thinner until they disappeared. Scrollbars vanished. Stronger contrast softened. We lost the visually rich design in applications and icons. And now, we’ve even lost the ability to make unique icon silhouettes that Apple once specifically retained when introducing the iOS 7 aesthetic to macOS because that was a distinct element of its heritage.
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It’s asking a lot. For almost nothing in return. I keep looking at all the changes Liquid Glass brings, and I cannot find one instance where it has markedly improved the experience in any way.
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But what I am now absolutely sure of is that if the last decade represents Alan Dye’s vision for this platform, then I disagree with it. I don’t trust this direction. I didn’t need the last ten years to see that, but I’m disappointed that in ten years he still doesn’t see it.
In the past, technology used to be my coping space. A place for a knowledge worker like me to nerd about his tools and related passions — user interfaces, UI/UX design, typography, etc. And if I have developed these passions and interest is largely because of Apple. Apple had a huge impact on my life ever since I started using their computers. I carried out my apprenticeship in Desktop Publishing on a workstation that was comprised of a Macintosh SE, a Bernoulli Box external drive, and a LaserWriter printer back in 1989. I’ve always appreciated the care and attention to detail Apple put in their hardware design but also in their UI design.
But it’s true — something important died with Steve Jobs. He was really Apple’s kernel, for better and for… less better. This Apple has been dismantling Mac OS, as if it’s a foreign tool to them. They’ve bashed its UI around. And they seem to have done that not for the purpose of improving it, but simply for the purpose of changing it; adapting it to their (mostly misguided) idea of unifying the interface of different devices to bring it down to the simplest common denominator.
Well I think it is very clear that Apple does not believe there are new ideas to be had. This is a much deeper discussion, but to me all of their actions are representative of a company that believes technology is “mature” and all that is left to do, at best, is polish. Setting aside whether one agrees with Apple’s decisions/taste/whatever, I think it is not up for discussion that while these changes may be disruptive, they are not, nor are intended to be, “transformative”.
Baked into the explanation that Liquid Glass “frees your content from the tyranny of the UI” is the inescapable admission that you have determined that the highest priority item left for iOS is to “return roughly 40px of screen real estate, or 3% of the vertical space of an iPhone, to users”. That is the important part here. Not whether LG does or doesn’t deliver, but rather that Apple did not find, and thus does not believe there exists, anything more interesting to do in all of 2025.
Also, there are bugs that have been around for more than six years (I was still working when I reported them) that they could have been fixing, but those don’t even get looked at. They’re too busy making new bugs instead.
Previously:
- Roundrect Dictator
- macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 2
- iOS 26 Developer Beta 2
- Liquid Glass
- The macOS App Icon Book
Update (2025-07-04): Francisco Tolmasky:
Fashion is the state an industry degrades to once all the available innovation has been exhausted.
It is the “white dwarf” conclusion for fields with insufficient justifiable change to provide an indefinite source of legitimate novelty. The term we use to identify the fields that defy this destiny is “technology”.
If you want to understand Apple’s insistence on a yearly update schedule, you must first understand that Apple no longer sees their software as technology, but rather as fashion.
This explains the seeming disconnect between Apple and its users: how can Apple remove key features “we depend on” so callously, in fact, oftentimes proudly? The stakes seem high to “us” and low to “them”.
But Apple’s position makes perfect sense if you view each of these features not as a step towards or away from some theoretical target “ideal functionality,” but rather as a “fashion trend” that is either still “in” or “out of” style.
I have never once gotten the impression that anyone on Alan Dye’s UI team uses serious pro tool apps. They love making beautiful looking things, not solving difficult UI problems with clever solutions. And I suspect when confronted with difficult UI problems, they say “Shut up with that nerd stuff.”
You know, I could write a whole blog post about this—and I might—but I think we need to start addressing the very likely possibility that the entire thesis that “UI should get out of the way” and “apps should focus on content” is wrong.
Apps aren’t just for looking at photos or videos. They’re for navigating through these things, organizing them, editing them. The tools to do those things should not get out of the way. They should be clearly defined and separate from the content.
The problem is not the introduction of glass as an element of the visual design language. If used as the Dock background alone, it would be totally fine! But because someone said “UI should get out of the way” and no one challenged it—instead of content literally being the focus, Apple has to intentionally put content out of focus (blurring) to make the glass elements visible. They have to put a gradient behind the glass so you can see it. That should’ve been the “oh, it doesn’t work” moment.
But here we are with a new visual design language that somehow manages to compromise on both the content area and the UI.
Liquid Glass’ blurred content everywhere is especially cruel to those of us who use reading glasses or progressives.
The reflex to seeing blurry text on our phones is to adjust our sight angle or distance to sharpen it. But, of course, it’s not our fault, doesn’t sharpen, and just causes eyestrain.
Text on my phone should never be blurry.
I’m still optimistic about some of the elements of Liquid Glass, but, so far, every change I’ve made to adapt to the look has directly reduced the visibility user’s content and the accessibility of important functions.
Having spent the weekend with my parents, less visibility will be a disaster for them. The (…) button scares them.
There are two stages to this, in two different axes (being: icons and the general UI).
The first stage is: I can't believe that Apple is doing their developers and their ecosystem dirty this way. In which way does someone look at all this and imagine that this will be sufficient for developers to express what they want to express? Look at the progression to this point, look at what is given up and look at for what. Negligible wins in screen space even on the most space constrained devices (aside from Apple Watch, where the layering and overlapping is highly limited to begin with), and effects that are technically impressive but not in the apparent service of any particular goal.
The second stage is: I can't believe that Apple is doing this to themselves. To their own icons and their own user interfaces. I have yet to find a single user interface in their own OS, in the most-baked Liquid Glass UIs currently in existence, that is functionally improved. There are loads of them that have been functionally and hierarchically crippled.
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The Bas Ording school sometimes uses a neat effect to enable new functionality (seeing more things with Dock magnification, keeping track of where things go with windows animating in and out of sheets and the dock, shrinking and moving around with Exposé). But the effect was never the point. The visuals were tweaked from version to version and certainly changed over time.
The Alan Dye school always starts with dropping a manifesto. […] None of the interfaces seem like they were iterated on in order to increase usability, readability, utility or understandability in the slightest. […] As far as I can tell, Apple's just lost its sense of UI design priorities completely.
In fact, the act of squishing controls into a single row actually exacerbates the relative lack of screen real estate in the horizontal axis. With iPhone dimensions as they are, horizontal space is constrained, and you have to be very selective about what can fit in the bounds of the screen’s width. Inevitably, this means important items must be hidden away.
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Personally, I find the minimisation trend most egregious in the Music app.
I know zero former coworkers at Apple who actually like Liquid Glass. Every single time it has come up in conversation so far the reaction has been negative.
I am in two group-chats with ex-Apple folks and both chats have devolved into Liquid Glass hate-fests.
Pretty frustrated with all of the iOS/iPad/macOS 26… everything.
I feel like suddenly nothing works. I can’t do anything I want to do. And everything is broken. It feels like a giant waste of time churning.
There are plenty of times where the UI looks positively gorgeous. In the Apple Music screenshot above, I think those elements look stunning, and they look even better in motion as content swirls around the background as I scroll. I also really like the address bar at the bottom of Safari, which really comes to life when scrolling sites with fun colors. Tellingly, I have an iPhone still on iOS 18 and it does feel a bit dull in comparison.
But there are also times where it doesn't look great and can be genuinely hard to read. This got better in the second round of betas, but it's definitely not completely fixed yet. And even when it is working right, UI elements bounce from what I can only describe as light mode to dark mode over and over as their background content changes. I find this distracting and visually unpleasant.
But my gosh, this is a multi-trillion dollar company that’s getting free design critique from people who love and rely on these platforms the most. For free. Absolutely nothing in return. It’s almost as if we’re all posting about it because of desperation. So many of us are hoping this really isn’t what we have to live with for the next five or ten years. Despite knowing it will take time away from the things we’d much rather be doing, we’re writing blog posts and recording podcasts and posting on social media anyway.
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App icons are all over the place. In some ways, they gained detail, in others, they lost detail. Almost every icon has an unfortunate concession to fit into this Liquid Glass model.
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But what I can’t help but notice for 12 years now is that without visual effects serving to differentiate one control from another, we’ve lost immediate recognition of different UI elements. Title bars merged with toolbars. Toolbars merged with tab bars. Is this icon an action or a tab? Will it open a menu or switch the view? It’s anybody’s guess. The conflation of basically all these UI elements with iOS 7 and a step further with Liquid Glass in the 26 release makes me think someone doesn’t understand there is a difference between these kinds of UI elements. Or maybe they don’t care about the difference.
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Every time I see an issue, I ask, “What problem is this solving?” And every time, there is no answer. There is seemingly no benefit to any of this. That isn’t to say there aren’t good UI changes in this release. It’s just that some of these visual decisions are impacting the UI. Instead of working together, they seem to be at odds with each other.
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At the point when you have to blur the content area to make the UI stand out from it, how can you possibly argue that it gets out of the way? It makes no sense.
Update (2025-07-08): See more screenshots from Louie Mantia, Jr.
Update (2025-07-14): Craig Grannell (Mastodon):
The guidance I – and, I’m sure, others – have provided multiple times to Apple is that motion that cannot be controlled by the user should ideally be removed; which, in reality, has meant being replaced by a crossfade – good enough for most users with vestibular issues. You’ll see this if you activate Reduce Motion on your iPhone. The 3D zoom ‘blast’ when opening folders will be gone. As will other animations, such as when you move through menu hierarchies. (At least in software that doesn’t use its own proprietary animations that ignore Reduce Motion, such as RSS client Reeder.)
What people often don’t realise is that even small/fast pop-out menu animations can be enough to ‘blast’ someone to the point they can be made dizzy. Additionally, transforming static to animated UI via refraction is a potential trigger.
Previously:
- iPadOS 26 Developer Beta 3
- iOS 26 Developer Beta 3
- macOS Tahoe 26 Developer Beta 3
- The Ongoing Battle for Vestibular Accessibility
19 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Sometimes I think I’m too cynical. But like paranoia, I suppose it’s not cynicism if their motivations really are self serving.
This seems like it will wind up being a lateral movement at best, talk about shuffling deck chairs. They have tons of real issues right now but they chose to further alienate their developers.
So that Alan Dye can make everything look like Vision Pro. And Tim Cook is too busy chasing Hollywood celebrities to stop him.
Saying Liquid Glass "frees your content from the tyranny of the UI" has a subtle, icky message in there. Besides the blandness of the word "content", it feels like they're trying to take power away from the end users (the UI is what empowers us to interact with and control our devices) and focus on consuming more unending shlock from Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
If anything, for many of us who have been with Macs for 30+ years -- or even only since OS X debuted -- seeing Apple slaughter the UI for no apparent reason other than change for the sake of change is just... very depressing.
It doesn't help that they really have no competition in the desktop space for a better UI.
Translucency and most animations don't help make the UI better AT ALL.
I feel like Apple is trying to turn its platform's UI into the type of bullshit that you see in sci-fi films.
Sometimes I wonder if Apple execs just use their computers to look at wallpaper and get mad whenever a computer part of the computer’s interface gets in the way.
Within Apple one camp delivers embedded exclaves running on a variant of L4. The other drives macOS UI inexorably closer to iPadOS’s. I am beginning to wonder if the Car project, or other large internal projects with little to no traction, drained away too many resources. Leaving a part of Apple, originally contributing very much to products success, apparently on the self destructive path of recycling former glories. Liquid glass as a twisted Aqua.
After working with it for a couple of weeks on iOS I feel that they’ve done some really simple clever changes that enable much better consistency across apps (lets ignore concentricity and glass effects for a moment). The reality is that their hardware is so much better that we have to roll with the software punches however stunning they may be.
@Name
We don’t though, I am personally rejecting the liquid glass aesthetic in all the apps I work on because it is such an enormous regression in terms of usability.
I was already rolling my own sidebars to avoid the muddy mess that is the one that can be printed with desktop wallpapers (which makes coloured distinct icons difficult to implement).
I guess now I’ll roll my own tab bars and tool bars too.
Honestly if I could turn off the stupid dynamic shrinking away the UI in safari when I scroll I’d do that too.
UI shouldn’t move when i am trying to use it and I don’t need the now playing controls to get even smaller just to show me less than an album or one more song.
Even with the nav bar, now playing bat and tab bar I can still see more rows than I could back in the iPhone 5 days…
It's nice to see other people expressing the same feelings I have about the degradation of macOS and iOS. They were simply better before 2013. And it helps to be able to commiserate with other people, rather than doing it alone.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: When Apple started to mess up macOS, the ceiling of quality in the entire computer industry lowered with it, because macOS was the best. There was no other OS that even came close to its level of design from back then. And there still isn't.
To contribute to the conversation:
I think a big part of the problem is that our entire society, but especially the technology sector, has this notion that things are always supposed to be changing, because we're on a constant and inevitable march towards progress. There's a belief that each year we do things better than we did the previous year. It stems from the early to mid 20th century, where the world was seeing unprecedented technological developments, and there really was a *tangible* sense of progress and an idea that we were on our way to something better.
But it was always a myth. With one hand we were discarding old ways of doing things for new ones without understanding what was important about the old ways nor understanding the compromises of what was new. And as the 20th century came to a close, it started to become more and more clear, at least to anyone who was paying attention, that things were *not* always getting better. And the story of the 21st century so far has been that of societal stagnation and degradation, regardless of the arrival of smartphones or modern deep neural nets, and definitely in no small part due to the arrival of modern social media. People are generally working harder for less, more stressed, less happy, and less stable, both financially and emotionally.
One of the big consequences of this myth is that businesses have this sense of always needing to be shifting and growing. A big part of that of course is venture capital which literally *requires* them to grow and grow, but even privately owned businesses still have this sense that if you're in the same place you were ten years ago, even if your business is completely stable and prosperous, you're doing something wrong. It's part of the reason why great and beloved products have a tendency to disappear or become shitty a decade later. Nothing lasts.
So then we come to Apple. They made extraordinary leaps in user interface design with the original Macintosh -- just look at what the competition was in 1984. And over the next two decades they refined it to what we got with Mac OS X around the 10.5 through 10.9 era. The *smart* thing to do would be to keep it mostly as it was, because it functioned great. I'm not saying it should have remained completely stagnant since it ought to adapt as the world around it changes, and I'm sure it would have been possible to make improvements to it. But of course that's not what we got; more or less every change to it since then has been a degradation. The only explanations for chucking it in the garbage is change for change's sake (as outlined above), ignorance, and incompetence. I think it's a hearty mix of all three.
"Liquid glass" was a totally predictable continuation of what Apple has been doing for over a decade now. There was no reason to believe it would be better than what we had before, and every reason to believe it would be worse in pretty much every way.
I'll go back now to playing around with my SE/30 and enjoying the functional, individually distinguishable, unique, and utterly delightful designs of Susan Kare and the rest of the original Mac team.
It's the first time since I own an iPhone (started with iPhone 4 god knows how many years ago) that I have disabled automatic updates. I don't want or need this crap.
I also wish I would have hold off iOS 18.5 which completely broke Bluetooth connectivity: every time I need to connect a different device, I have to toggle Bluetooth off and on first, otherwise none of my already paired devices connect anymore... Neither automatically, nor manually. So infuriating...
@Bri "The *smart* thing to do would be to keep it mostly as it was, because it functioned great."
Yes, but that's not "making a dent in the universe".
Of all the things Jobs ever said, I think that Stanfod commencement address is one of the most harmful. It provided a justification for everybody to go out and impose change on everything *regardless of whether anyone else wanted those things changed* for no reason other than egotistical self-actualisation.
Its the ultimate "because I can" explanation.
Meanwhile, we're all having to take our universe to the panel beater over and over, because some other "creative genius" decided that Fashion is the model for the maintenance of tools, and wants to "disrupt" comfort and predictability, so we'll remember their name.
> . The reality is that their hardware is so much better that we have to roll with the software punches however stunning they may be.
Devs that don't care for Liquid Glass ideally would resist Apple and not redesign their apps. I'm not very optimistic about this (see Swift).
I think I listened to ATP a few weeks ago and they were highly critical about Liquid glass on the merits (can't read text etc.) while also saying "as soon as you install iOS 26 your app with the old design immediately looks old" therefore basically conceding that they'll just go with the flow.
For whatever it's worth my most downloaded app doesn't even use the iOS 7 redesign. Nobody cares. People write reviews calling it beautifully designed all the time. Do the UIAppearance APIs still work on 26?
You don't have to make your UI look like glass bottom boat if you don't want to. But it sucks that most developers will. And we will probably be stuck with it for 5-10 years. So this shit will be all across the system. But if enough devs just decided they aren't going to do it, Apple would have to at least reconsider. Or just liquid glass would be a mostly "apple only apps" thing.
As a daily Mac user, I'm either really lucky, or people really over-exaggerate how "buggy" Apple's software is.
The one exception is anything revolving around the Swift dev chain - that actually is buggy.
@ObjC4Life
I am working on a few small-ish apps for clients right now and so far they seem happy with my design direction (which has rejected Apple's guidelines for a while now)
I have so far rolled a custom sidebar, custom toolbars, and I guess now even more custom controls.
I too am distressed by everyone calling this beautiful, it isn't. What it is is vibrant, it's shiny with bright colours. That gives the illusion of beauty but every now and then you hit an edge and it's just hideous. I always have scroll bars turned on and they look terrible with the new design.
I recommend all devs ignore Apple because they have clearly abandoned the principles of good UI design. They have made everything pretty terrible in terms of actual usability.
Liquid Glass is like a demoscene demo but running on your phone.
There are genuinely cool things — the outline-morphing of buttons to panels, buttons to bigger buttons, etc. are really neat (watch a transition frame-by-frame to see what I mean) Nice animation effects that would work regardless of if it’s clear or not. Actually, if you look at iOs 18’s control panel, play with the volume slider and other buttons — they have a nice ‘gummy’ stretchy effect. Precursors to liquid glass, I’m sure.
Would this work better if it were liquid mercury? (i.e. silvery opaque?) Maybe?
I don’t love it, but they’re gonna improve it before the release… more opaque, I’m betting… and it usually takes me a week or two to acclimate to a change like this, and probably a year or two for apps to catch up and get usable again.
I suspect this is them showing off the GPU — there’s all this GPU power that’s just sitting idle, and Android phones can’t do it. Also, it’s also unifying the UI style across all their platforms. I don’t love it but they were pretty disparate — especially between iPad and Mac. Also, there’s a movement towards edge-to-edge content… whereas we used to have floating palettes, then solid panels, now we’re moving back to palettes (think iWork, Adobe, Figma apps)
Hot-take:
There’s more and more abstraction, and therefore simplification. Too much, IMO.
Whereas the iPhone started out super-literal. “This is a yellow lined note pad” “This is a button like you’d find on your car” — we changed to text label buttons, and now those text label buttons are now semi-inscrutable buttons which have flattened semantic meaning. Is that blue check button int the corner a ‘done’ or ‘yes’? the X in the other corner a ‘close’ or a ‘cancel’?
In the old days (15 years ago), you could leverage our collective experience with the real world to inform users how something works via the appearance of your button/control. Not we don’t do that. Perhaps we can’t?
Let’s remember the age of the current iPhone users.
They didn’t grow up with hardware push radio buttons of the 70s (they probably don’t even know where that term comes from). Hardware dials? Nope. They didn’t have those. Everything they’ve grown up with has been capacitive on a flat glass surface.
To me, this leads to over-simplification of applications becuase there’s less ability to have nuance. I see over-flattening? Look iOS 18’s Photos App interface. No hierarchy, even.
Also, seems to me they’re trying new things but trying new things for millions and millions of customers… that’s a tough audience.
@Someone else What makes you say that Android phone GPUs couldn’t do it? It looks like someone already implemented the effect in WebGL.
@Michael Tsai — that WebGL implementation is very impressive work, but more than that, the Read Me is hilarious. Probably deserves a link post in its own right.
"Android phones can’t do it"
The certitude of one's convictions often appears inversely proportional to the expansiveness of one's comprehension.
The idea that Android phones can't render realistic glass is bizarre. Sadly, while I would love to say that I find Android's Expressive Design a better option than what Apple's increasingly lost and confused designers have come up with, they're both shit.
@Someone else
Re: "Let’s remember the age of the current iPhone users. They didn’t grow up with hardware push radio buttons of the 70s (they probably don’t even know where that term comes from). Hardware dials? Nope. They didn’t have those. Everything they’ve grown up with has been capacitive on a flat glass surface."
This is kind of strange circular argument. They grew up with flat interfaces because the UI designers decided to make everything flat. And in doing so they threw the baby out with the bathwater when they got rid of any trace of skeuomorphism.
There's no reason we can't have a consistent, clear design language to denote the function and boundaries of UI elements like we did before. Skeuomorphism has the advantage of leveraging our experience with the real world, and if we stuck with it, then young people who don't know about radio buttons from the 70s would see it in computer interfaces and learn it there. But at least the function of the buttons would be clear.
And on a more broader point, I feel like people often forget the inherent advantages to *non-flat* interfaces. Regardless of what physical objects you have experience with in your day to day life, your eyes have evolved to be able to distinguish shape through light and shadow *instantly and unconsciously*. It's insane that everything went flat and we got rid of that insane advantage. Back with OS X 10.9 or iOS 6, I could look at an interface and immediately recognize the relevant shapes, because they looked three dimensional.
> I have so far rolled a custom sidebar, custom toolbars, and I guess now even more custom controls.
I've heard some people say that the UI was inspired by a shower door but it 100% is a glass bottom boat.
@Benjamin Is there sufficient hooks to customize the appearance of things (UIAppearance etc.) to just disable the glass bottom boat UI with minimal effort?
I haven't gotten around to messing with the liquid glass stuff yet directly. I'm neck deep in model code for an upcoming app right now so I haven't gotten around to actually dealing with glass programmatically. Maybe I'm being silly and I should make liquid glass testing/adoption higher priority. But I'm assuming my current apps built against the old SDK won't get the liquid glass look until I recompile with the Xcode 26 so I'm not rushing it.
I do hope there is a way to disable glass without too much effort. This seems more disruptive than the iOS 7 transition.
Riccardo did a great job highlighting a lot of the issues with liquid glass. Makes no sense to bring focus to the content underneath...that's why it's underneath!
In a real glass bottom boat you're supposed to see what's underneath because you're looking into the ocean, or whatever--that is the view. The glass bottom boat metaphor doesn't work for software.
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@Michael Tsai I think a comment or two got modded out. My bad I'll keep it PG.
