Liquid Glass is inspired by Apple’s visionOS software and can adapt to light and dark environments. When you swipe up on the iOS 26 lockscreen there’s a glass edge, and elements throughout the OS have glass edges to them. Even the camera app has the glass feel, with menus that are transparent and features that are overlaid on top of the camera feed.
Liquid Glass uses real-time rendering and will dynamically react to movement. Apple is using it on buttons, switches, sliders, text, media controls, and even larger surfaces like tab bars and sidebars. Apple has redesigned its controls, toolbars, and navigation within apps to fit this new Liquid Glass design.
Tom Warren
Speaking of Apple, the big announcement of the 2025 WWDC was… a new design language. The reactions have not been particularly favorable, since the heavy doses of transparency in every corner of the user interface can lead to low contrast and poor readability, even for people with normal vision. I have no access to a live example, but some of the screenshots I’ve seen online are borderline impossible to read. This is a long-standing argument dating back to the slick holo-screens from the movie Minority Report; while everyone loves the novelty and the cool factor on screen, the lack of anything similar in real life might serve as a clue that these effects are impractical for regular use.
I think the main issue behind Liquid Glass is that it was designed around VisionOS. Virtual reality has a degree of freedom that other digital mediums cannot match. Apple itself boasted about how you can place windows all around you in the virtual environment, even when it mimics your actual surroundings or in pass-through mode. There’s basically a lot more space available than on a computer monitor, let alone a comparatively tiny smartphone screen. So, if a dialog or window is hard to read on the current background, in VR you can simply reposition it to a more suitable location, or swap out the background entirely; you cannot do that (easily) on a phone. The smaller the screen, the greater information density, making it ever more likely that higher transparency will lead to unpleasant clashes between foreground and background. I guess that’s what you get when Apple tries to inject some semblance of relevance into their failed supposed flagship, the Vision Pro.
Translucent UI is usually a bad idea outside of movies and non-critical game interfaces.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) June 10, 2025
The early moments of joy are fleeting, while the usability issues remain. Windows and Mac have both been down this road before, but I guess a new generation of designers needs to learn the… https://t.co/GC8YqPZTdv
By now it’s almost tradition that each Apple announcement is immediately followed by a chorus of voices pointing out how ‘Android/Google/Microsoft did this first’, but this year’s updates seemed particularly susceptible. I mean… typing indicators?! More Genmoji?! What stood out to me most was Visited Places, Apple’s answer to Google Location History/Timeline, a feature that has been around for more than a decade… though to be fair Apple Maps had barely even launched back then.
Criticism of its usability aside, I just don’t see how a design overhaul and incremental tweaks to exiting apps can attract new users and drive growth for Apple. While I tend to agree with their slow approach to LLMs (though I suspect it has more to do with internal inertia and lack of proper resources than with a clear overarching strategy), nothing suggests that the executive team has any vision of what Apple could offer in the future. They all appear increasingly out of touch with their userbase and developers, made complacent by years of dominating the smartphone market, isolated from any meaningful competition by their monopolistic practices. It’s high time for reform inside Apple, but I doubt anyone there has the guts to do it.
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