WWDC 2025: Liquid Glass Design

[swk9]

Kind of the return of skeuomorphism but in a less clunky style.

I was half hoping they would bring back the tape animation to the podcast app but I doubt that'll happen soon. That was the peak skeuomorphic iOS era and I was almost sad to see all of it disappear so quickly.

I do like Apple is taking a bold step with the new look and I trust them enough to at least give it a try.

I remember how much people hated the new icons in iOS 7 and some even offered up a "fix" which was mostly just making icons look like the old one whereas now the new icon looks right. I wonder how this new visual style will age.

 

[Cmaier]

I was half hoping they would bring back the tape animation to the podcast app but I doubt that'll happen soon. That was the peak skeuomorphic iOS era and I was almost sad to see all of it disappear so quickly.

I do like Apple is taking a bold step with the new look and I trust them enough to at least give it a try.

I remember how much people hated the new icons in iOS 7 and some even offered up a "fix" which was mostly just making icons look like the old one whereas now the new icon looks right. I wonder how this new visual style will age.

I still miss coverflow

 

[Joelist]

I keep remembering that the big benefit of iOS 7 at the time was that the new flat presentation was WAY less GPU intensive. Which was a good thing and the iPhones and iPads that went to 7 were appreciably faster and smoother than the same hardware on 6. I suspect that they feel they now have a sufficiently powerful graphics capability in Apple Silicon that they can do this more GPU intensive approach.

 

[throAU]

Apple seems to have forgotten that simplicity, usability and legibility are the key priorities in UI design.

of all the issues I have with iOS, UI transparency was not on the list, until today.


Glad they've finally attended to iPadOS though and made it actually capable of the things MacBook Airs with the same hardware have been doing for 5 years.

 

[mr_roboto]

I keep remembering that the big benefit of iOS 7 at the time was that the new flat presentation was WAY less GPU intensive. Which was a good thing and the iPhones and iPads that went to 7 were appreciably faster and smoother than the same hardware on 6. I suspect that they feel they now have a sufficiently powerful graphics capability in Apple Silicon that they can do this more GPU intensive approach.

The iOS 6 presentation was "flat" in the sense that controls and so forth were just 2D bitmap images with visual cues of depth baked in. IIRC, there wasn't any use of the GPU to render depth on the fly. If any phones were faster and smoother under iOS 7, I'd take that as a sign that Apple just went through everything, found a bunch of performance problems, and fixed them.

 

[leman]

I keep remembering that the big benefit of iOS 7 at the time was that the new flat presentation was WAY less GPU intensive. Which was a good thing and the iPhones and iPads that went to 7 were appreciably faster and smoother than the same hardware on 6. I suspect that they feel they now have a sufficiently powerful graphics capability in Apple Silicon that they can do this more GPU intensive approach.

iOS 7 did feature translucency and blurred backgrounds. While liquid glass shaders appear more visually striking, the shader cost won’t be that different (i can imagine that new shaders use more memory bandwidth).

 

[amonduin]

Apple seems to have forgotten that simplicity, usability and legibility are the key priorities in UI design.

of all the issues I have with iOS, UI transparency was not on the list, until today.


Glad they've finally attended to iPadOS though and made it actually capable of the things MacBook Airs with the same hardware have been doing for 5 years.

I don't think it's just transparency there are so many problems with these changes. Mostly related to throwing out a ton of user interface principles in favour of making something "pretty".

This new design, like everything since iOS 7, is designed to be looked at, not designed to be used.

Personally, I think the transparent glass look is overhyped and that it mostly looks like a muddy, noisy, blurry, mess.


Let's ask a question, what is the purpose of UI controls? To make it easy and fast to take action on the content.

Toolbars with a constant stable opaque background reduce visual noise and distraction and make it easy to achieve this goal. The new floating toolbar buttons work against this goal in a number off ways. For example, not only is the content going around your buttons (visual noise around the buttons distracts you from your task) but you also have constant colour changes that make it hard/impossible to use coloured icons on your buttons and also the new buttons make conveying the current state of a button more difficult.

The transforming tab bars (as seen in music) are another violation of good UI principles. When the UI transforms it moves the location of buttons that should have constant location allowing muscle memory to kick in, further more it hides useful controls behind an extra step, I don't want to have my interaction slowed down just because I had the temerity to actually try and use the app (scroll a list). I already hate this behaviour in Safari, if I want a distraction free reading experience which hides my toolbar and search bar I'll use reader mode (which I use all the time).


The end goal is the problem with Apple's current design leads. We don't use most apps just to look at things (and for those we do like photos and videos the UI sensibly disappears when necessary). We use apps to do things, and when you start with the premise that apps are about looking at things not doing things you end up continually making the UI harder to use in favour of trying to get rid of all controls.

 

[Nycturne]

iOS 7 did feature translucency and blurred backgrounds. While liquid glass shaders appear more visually striking, the shader cost won’t be that different (i can imagine that new shaders use more memory bandwidth).

I was debating bringing that point up too.

I'll just add UIKit contains a lot of what is now the standard effects tools in iOS 8 (UIVibrancyEffect and UIBlurEffect). So clearly Apple was taking a cycle to iterate on this stuff then too.

Toolbars with a constant stable opaque background reduce visual noise and distraction and make it easy to achieve this goal. The new floating toolbar buttons work against this goal in a number off ways. For example, not only is the content going around your buttons (visual noise around the buttons distracts you from your task) but you also have constant colour changes that make it hard/impossible to use coloured icons on your buttons and also the new buttons make conveying the current state of a button more difficult.

Yup, toolbar buttons definitely have to effectively be re-done in certain cases to align with the new UX, and many of the things we used to take as standard aren't anymore. And Apple doesn't tell us what they should be either for these cases (just the more common ones). So my job is now to look to see what was done in places so I can try to adopt what Apple is doing in certain places. (EDIT: Turns out Apple hasn't had time to adapt either, see the attached screenshot)

And you can clearly see some of what Apple has done in 26 to address some of the visual readability issues, which themselves aren't terribly pretty. For example, Leman's screenshot from earlier. Where you have this fade out effect where the toolbar would be in order to protect it from the content rendering it unreadable. When it could, you know, just be used as a well defined space for controls with clear visual separation?

The transforming tab bars (as seen in music) are another violation of good UI principles. When the UI transforms it moves the location of buttons that should have constant location allowing muscle memory to kick in, further more it hides useful controls behind an extra step, I don't want to have my interaction slowed down just because I had the temerity to actually try and use the app (scroll a list). I already hate this behaviour in Safari, if I want a distraction free reading experience which hides my toolbar and search bar I'll use reader mode (which I use all the time).

This is a reason I've fought adopting the tab bar in my own app, despite it mostly feeling right on iPad/Mac (but not at all on iPhone). I've actually gotten to the point where I'm considering abandoning SwiftUI's top-level navigation paradigms in favor of doing it with UIKit on iOS, but as AppKit doesn't really have a comparable navigation controller, I've kept pushing it off (iPad and Mac currently share all the navigation code). SwiftUI has a working navigation controller for macOS, but not AppKit, which is rather annoying.

The end goal is the problem with Apple's current design leads. We don't use most apps just to look at things (and for those we do like photos and videos the UI sensibly disappears when necessary). We use apps to do things, and when you start with the premise that apps are about looking at things not doing things you end up continually making the UI harder to use in favour of trying to get rid of all controls.

I think you can see this in how the WWDC sessions keep talking about "focusing on your app's content". They are trying to push the chrome into the margins more and more to make more space available for what the app wants to show. But this really focuses on consumption models where the app basically is just trying to give you photos, movies, games, etc... stuff you consume, rather than giving you tools to do things.

 

[Yoused]

About 25 years ago, my friend got me to try her favorite Windows web search app, I forget what it was called, kepple or somesuch. Running slow on VPC was not that big a deal, but the visual appearance of it still gives me nightmares. All the Windows-gray buttons had icons that were hard-ass primary colors that left after-images in my retinas.

I look at my iPad home screen and see there is a blu-ish app icon, and a red one and a couple of black ones with either a small orange or small purple graphic inside. These color cues (way understated compared to Windows) draw me quickly to the thing I want to open.

So, now you want to take those cues away and force me to visually resolve a subtle bas relief instead? Ok, I was getting stuff done too easily, sorry about that.

 

[Roller]

I don't think it's just transparency there are so many problems with these changes. Mostly related to throwing out a ton of user interface principles in favour of making something "pretty".

This new design, like everything since iOS 7, is designed to be looked at, not designed to be used.

Personally, I think the transparent glass look is overhyped and that it mostly looks like a muddy, noisy, blurry, mess.


Let's ask a question, what is the purpose of UI controls? To make it easy and fast to take action on the content.

Toolbars with a constant stable opaque background reduce visual noise and distraction and make it easy to achieve this goal. The new floating toolbar buttons work against this goal in a number off ways. For example, not only is the content going around your buttons (visual noise around the buttons distracts you from your task) but you also have constant colour changes that make it hard/impossible to use coloured icons on your buttons and also the new buttons make conveying the current state of a button more difficult.

The transforming tab bars (as seen in music) are another violation of good UI principles. When the UI transforms it moves the location of buttons that should have constant location allowing muscle memory to kick in, further more it hides useful controls behind an extra step, I don't want to have my interaction slowed down just because I had the temerity to actually try and use the app (scroll a list). I already hate this behaviour in Safari, if I want a distraction free reading experience which hides my toolbar and search bar I'll use reader mode (which I use all the time).


The end goal is the problem with Apple's current design leads. We don't use most apps just to look at things (and for those we do like photos and videos the UI sensibly disappears when necessary). We use apps to do things, and when you start with the premise that apps are about looking at things not doing things you end up continually making the UI harder to use in favour of trying to get rid of all controls.

I'll reserve judgement until I play with it myself, but having viewed a few videos of the new Liquid Glass UI in iOS 26, I've become more skeptical. In some instances, I'm afraid the added translucency of UI elements will make them harder to read, especially if they contain text. If this turns out to be the case, I hope it will be possible to turn off or tone down these effects in accessibility settings.

 

[Yoused]

harder to read, especially if they contain text

There is a simple solution to this: they could (ought to, really) do something like outlines (as with meme text) or half-outlines (like a narrow shadow).

 

[Citysnaps]

I'll reserve judgement until I play with it myself...

Same here. I'm skeptical a proper assessment can be made with reviewers displaying a video made with an iPhone of another iPhone under test with the new iOS (sorry for the clumsy grammar).

Seems almost everyone at the other place have reflexively panned it. But that's expected, knowing there's a tradition of hating everything Apple does that's new.

 

[Altaic]

I'll reserve judgement until I play with it myself, but having viewed a few videos of the new Liquid Glass UI in iOS 26, I've become more skeptical. In some instances, I'm afraid the added translucency of UI elements will make them harder to read, especially if they contain text. If this turns out to be the case, I hope it will be possible to turn off or tone down these effects in accessibility settings.

I read that it can be disabled in accessibility settings. Not sure if it’s adjustable beyond that, though.

 

[Nycturne]

I'll reserve judgement until I play with it myself, but having viewed a few videos of the new Liquid Glass UI in iOS 26, I've become more skeptical. In some instances, I'm afraid the added translucency of UI elements will make them harder to read, especially if they contain text. If this turns out to be the case, I hope it will be possible to turn off or tone down these effects in accessibility settings.

I do think @Cmaier is right that we'll see some iteration on this, and what they choose to revise is key. What we got in beta 1 seems rather rough in multiple ways based on my time in the simulator so far. But the fact that their glamor shots include some really hard to read text and iconography in common controls, is concerning. It sends the signal that it is intentional and has been signed off on.

I don't mind the idea of bringing back layering or "glass-like" interfaces. But I find it interesting that while this does take some inspiration from visionOS, it seems to take it a few steps further in ways that visionOS didn't, and visionOS' initial versions seem to use a lot more material layering to create spaces that are more ideal for text to sit in, which I don't mind.

 

[amonduin]

I'll reserve judgement until I play with it myself, but having viewed a few videos of the new Liquid Glass UI in iOS 26, I've become more skeptical. In some instances, I'm afraid the added translucency of UI elements will make them harder to read, especially if they contain text. If this turns out to be the case, I hope it will be possible to turn off or tone down these effects in accessibility settings.

Same here. I'm skeptical a proper assessment can be made with reviewers displaying a video made with an iPhone of another iPhone under test with the new iOS (sorry for the clumsy grammar).

Seems almost everyone at the other place have reflexively panned it. But that's expected, knowing there's a tradition of hating everything Apple does that's new.

The glass effect itself isn't really the biggest problem though. They could fix the transparency and the fundamental principles would still be broken.

The big problem is something that has been a trend for years, at least since iOS 7, and that is the trend away from apps that are designed to be used towards apps that are designed to be looked at.

In almost every single app shown there are fewer on screen controls than there used to be. The new design, while claiming to offer more space for content, doesn't actually offer more usable space for content because the removal of toolbars means that the buttons need more whitespace around them than they used to. This means that toolbars, search bars, tab bars, take up more space and have blurry/shadowed background areas around them that just introduce visual noise without adding any new useful functionality. The insistence on removing the navigation/toolbars also means titles can be hard to read in some contexts. Again I ask, why are we trying to show content around the buttons and tab bars? What purpose does this serve? It looks kind of neat at first glance then it just seems to be annoying and distracting.

The transforming UI is also a problem because it adds extra steps to interacting and using the app (if you have the temerity to scroll your tab bar shrinks away for no reason other than because they can). This was already annoying in safari in that I had an extra step to bring up the bottom toolbar (not to mention the cluttered mess that was the bottom tab bar/search bar integration in iOS 18 Safari).

I use apps to get tasks done, I don't open the music app and then scroll my lists of music to look at how pretty everything is, I want to get to a particular part of the app quickly, without controls jumping around. (Music has a very long standing bug where because of the way the large titlebar works the alphabetical jump-list on the right side moves if you scroll so if you tap m it becomes n because the list jumped under your finger)

 

[Cmaier]

I do think @Cmaier is right that we'll see some iteration on this, and what they choose to revise is key. What we got in beta 1 seems rather rough in multiple ways based on my time in the simulator so far. But the fact that their glamor shots include some really hard to read text and iconography in common controls, is concerning. It sends the signal that it is intentional and has been signed off on.

I don't mind the idea of bringing back layering or "glass-like" interfaces. But I find it interesting that while this does take some inspiration from visionOS, it seems to take it a few steps further in ways that visionOS didn't, and visionOS' initial versions seem to use a lot more material layering to create spaces that are more ideal for text to sit in, which I don't mind.

By the way, in my experience it is a lot nicer in the actual device than in the simulator.

 

[Yoused]

(Music has a very long standing bug where because of the way the large titlebar works the alphabetical jump-list on the right side moves if you scroll so if you tap m it becomes n because the list jumped under your finger)

I believe that is not unique to Music. When I want to change a language in gtranslate, it gives me its list of several hundred languages along with the jump bar on the side, which usually misses what I was aiming for – but, it comes close enough, and it is better than trying to scroll to Ukrainian, the hard way, from the top.

 

[throAU]

Honestly I think the best thing they could do with this liquid glass crap is tint the glass quite heavily (choose your own colour) and then give the user the option or the button face text/ui element colour.

this could work if the "liquid glass" was heavily smoked (darker) and the UI element/text was white for example.

I do find it ironic that the aqua windows buttons used to have the glassy look to them and were flattened in the name of the UI getting out of the way and now we're back to making things flashy, difficult to see and distracting again.

For a company so focused on "accessibility", seems like Apple's UI designers are given way too much freedom to do dumb shit. I'm not sure how different things will be from dev beta 1 on my iPad Air, which doesn't seem TOO bad at the moment, but then again I've not noticed much in the way of "liquid glass" on that yet.

edit:
I did just notice liquid glass on notifications... played with pulling it down 3-4 times and the iPad display black screened/crashed

Yeah, dev beta... so its rough.

I will say though that the changes to multitasking in iPad are very welcome, however, but there's quite a few bugs with regards to stage manager showing apps, getting back to apps, etc.