[WWDC 2025] New ‘Liquid Glass’ Design Language Coming To All Apple OSes This Year

WWDC is back, and Apple has introduced several major changes across its operating systems, including a brand-new design called ‘Liquid Glass’, debuting in iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26 (limited to Apple TV 4K 2nd Gen or newer).

Meet Liquid Glass

Apple says Liquid Glass is inspired by the “depth and dimensionality” of visionOS (its operating system for Vision Pro headset), and its translucent properties “behaves like glass in the real world.” The design element active responses to changes in the user interface, namely its colors and lighting via real-time rendering. Users are expected to see them in most of the commonly-seen interface points, including buttons, switches, sliders, text, media controls, tab bars, sidebars, home and lock screens, notifications, Control Center, and more.

While you can argue that everything looks nicer overall, some of the examples provided by Apple does seem to suggest that legibility may be affected in certain cases, such as when the buttons are floating above a particularly dark background. It’s just not as easily identifiable as a plain white button, so some users might find this a bit less intuitive to use. Another change in design philosophy with the new Liquid Glass UI is the full implementation of floating elements, including side bars that ‘floats’ instead of hugging the edge of the screen in older design languages.

This change also introduced a new clock face in lock screens: gone is the simple clock with the classic San Francisco font, and in comes the new Liquid Glass typeface that dynamically stretches based on the space in the background and the amount of notifications that pops up (you can still use the San Francisco font for the clock face). This also extends to home screens icons in iOS and desktop widgets for macOS Tahoe, both of which can now be rendered in Liquid Glass with monochrome colors.

Apple says developers building new Apple apps using SwiftUI, UIKit, and AppKit are provided with updated APIs to adopt the new design elements in their applications, facilitating integration of Liquid Glass and updated controls for a consistent user interaction across all platforms.

Pokdepinion: Looks nicer, but is it more intuitive? I have doubts.