Liquid Glass 27 Icons
Last year with iOS 26, Apple redesigned its full lineup of app icons for iPhone. But just one year later, iOS 27 has even more design changes for many app icons.
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iOS 27’s new app icons are “sharper and more detailed,” per Apple’s description. And it really shows.
If you’re curious how much changed from 26 to 27 for app icon rendering with Icon Composer, here are a few examples of the difference (in this thread). First of the pair is 26, the second is 27.
App icons also look significantly different now, but I think some of this is beta 1 bugs as the 27 rendering is very flat.
All app icons are getting a Liquid Glass update
The needless, barely-even-noticeable directional specular highlights based on the rotation of your phone on app icons are gone in iOS 27, and thank god for that.
Ohhhh they made app icons sharper! That was one of the things that stood out to me, some were sooo blurry… my mom noticed it too on her new iPad.
I will say that icons render better in #macOS27 so some of these icons look super sharp, super glassy, super sophisticated. Almost like something you’d buy at the Swarovski store.
I mean, look at this icon! Look at it closely. Zoom in. Almost gives me Mac OS X Tiger detail vibes.
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All I wanted from WWDC was release from squircle jail.
Just f***ng free macOS app icons from squircle jail already.
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Previously:
- Liquid Glass 27 Slider
- macOS Golden Gate 27 Announced
- iPadOS 27 Announced
- iOS 27 Announced
- WWDC 2026 Keynote
Update (2026-06-11): Ged Maheux:
I appreciate Apple wiping the vaseline off the screen for iOS 27. App icons seem significantly less fuzzy, especially in light mode, which is a good thing.
I think they dragged the sharpness slider too far in some cases, and some lines are too strong and too visible, but imho generally this is a change in a good direction (if it also scales well to various sizes). Some of those icons were annoyingly blurry in 26.
The clarity and legibility of almost all the icons have improved significantly, with icons like Photos packing a real visual punch. Additionally, viewing the icons at this size, you can see the nice refraction effects of the glass-like elements.
The one that really stood out for me, though, was the new Finder icon, which not only looks cleaner but also has a subtle change to the nose and the curve of the divide, bringing it much closer to the classic Finder icon from the pre-Liquid Glass days.
Here are a list of many of the icons across macOS Golden Gate (beta 1) compared to their liquid glass Tahoe counterpart.
Update (2026-06-16): Marcus Mendes:
Following Monday’s WWDC6 keynote, Apple updated its Design Resources portal with assets for iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 Golden Gate.
Notably missing were explicit download links to the SF Symbols 8 beta and the Icon Composer 2 beta. However, both are available to download, and you can get them below:
Update (2026-07-06): Louie Mantia:
In Icon Composer, effects are determined at a group level. Components within groups can only turn on/off effects wholesale.
If I choose “individual” on the group, I get individual specular highlights (great), but I also get individual shadows (not great).
If I choose “combined” on the group, I get a combined shadow (great), but I also get also get a combined specular highlight (not great).
I can’t win unless I bake in the specular highlight, which defeats the purpose.
4 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I was happy to hear that the icons were less blurry, but those aren't much of an improvement. Some of them (e.g., the Automator icon) look like somebody put them into an LLM and said, "Make it look sharper," and the LLM didn't quite understand what it was looking at, so it just added a bunch of random stuff.
"Almost gives me Mac OS X Tiger detail vibes."
This... is a joke... right? I sometimes can't tell.
@Plume Yes, it looks like they applied a sharpen filter instead of a blur filter, which is better but worse than we had before.
Imagine if every job was like this.
You get to decide one year to just fuck everything you did over your career totally up.
And then you get to spend the entire next year fixing it just a little bit, not nearly as bad as you broke it, and everyone says great job!
