Liquid Glass
Apple’s new Liquid Glass design, unveiled at WWDC 2025, marks the boldest visual shift in a decade across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. Inspired by the translucency of visionOS and classic skeuomorphism, it’s a unified aesthetic that blends form, context, and motion like never before.
First of all, I like the idea of a unified aesthetic across all Apple's platforms. It's a bold move and I think it's a good direction for the future of Apple's design. I'm using a lot Apple products, and I'm happy to see that the design is consistent across all of them.
At it's core, Liquid Glass uses a dynamic UI material that sits on top of the content. It is mainly used as a navigation layer, and it does not directly changes how the content is displayed. It adapts fluidly to light and content and this makes the content more immersive and engaging, at least in theory.
By the time I'm writing this, I've been using Liquid Glass for a few days now on my Macbook, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. And I have some mixed feelings about it.
The Good
As we are all familiar with the Dynamic Island, it's a great way to add a bit of visual interest to the interface. New Liquid Glass has the same sort of shrinking and expanding animation effects, which I enjoy a lot.
The navigation layer adapts and changes its shape and size based on the content it's covering at the moment. They shrink, reappear, change their color, and more. I really admire the effort Apple put into making the navigation layer feel more alive and engaging. You can watch the video below to see the philosophy behind it. It's actually a great video.
Another thing I like is the feedback you get when you interact with the navigation layer. When you hold and drag the navigation layer, it actually bends and moves. It's a subtle effect, but it's a nice touch.
The Bad
It's still a bit early to tell, we're on the very first developer beta and I'm sure it'll improve over time, however the readibility of the content inside of the Liquid Glass element is not as good as it was before. If you have a media-rich background under the Liquid Glass, then it actually feels like you are looking through a glass. And engineering behind this simply blows my mind.
The bad thing however it's not consistent enough, at least not yet. When you have a bright background and try to read the notifications in your notification center, the text is not readable. Like not at all. I would consider myself as a person with good eyesight, and I have to squint my eyes to read the text, especially when I'm outside under the sun. I mean, decide for yourself:
Also I noticed that the Liquid Glass effect kind of distracting when you are reading the content, especially on my iPhone. As I scroll down the page, the Liquid Glass effect kind of moves with me, and constant adapting to the content takes a lot attention. We already live in a world where we are constantly distracted by our phones, notifications and content, and this simply adds to the noise. And it can get annoying, really, really fast.
The Ugly
This might be a bit controversial. I'm not against the innovations or new experiments, I actually enjoy trying out new things a lot. However I think there are some things that we need to be careful with. We should not reinvent what is a good UI, what is a good UX, what is a good interaction design. We already cracked the code for the most part.
We tried to imitate the real world in the early days of the web (and mobile apps) because it was a new thing. We wanted to make it feel more natural, familiar and easy to understand. We literally copied the real world and made it digital. When you pressed a button, you actually felt like you are pressing a button. When you write something on the notebook in your phone, the UI was highly inspired by the real paper and notebook. And it was a success. People adapted to the digital world through using the UI that was inspired by the real world.
Now we are in a different stage of the digital world. We are not trying to make the digital world feel more natural, because now they are separate entities. The digital world is highly abstracted, we simplified the animations, effects, styling, and more, because we now have a lot of things going on on the screen. We multi-task all the time; there are several tabs open, we drag and drop between apps, and at the same time they all have their own UI. It's a lot of cognitive load for our little dumb human brains.
This is why we simplified our UIs. We adapted the real world and created a digital one based on it. It worked great, it still works great. However Apple now wants to go back to the real world, and as much as I like the idea, the engineering and art style, I think it doesn't work.
It took more than a decade for us to get to the point where we have a good UI that works for me, my mom, my grandma, almost even for my dog. We did a lot of experiments, research, A11Y testing, and more to get to the point where we have a good UI that works for everyone. And I'll give you a hint, it was not easy. Don't get me wrong, Apple contributed to this enhancement maybe more than any other company, but they look like they're throwing away all the achievements we made in the last decade.
When you take a screenshot with the new Liquid Glass environment, it either looks like a piece of art with the right conditions, or a horrible mess that looks like a poor work done by my 10 year old self, that experiments with cracked Photoshop. I'm not saying that the new Liquid Glass environment is not beautiful, it is, but it's not consistent.
This being said, I think this change is not necessarily a good or bad one. It's a new experiment, which works for some, however at the time being, my grandma would go crazy if I updated her iPhone. They need to fix the readability of the content, the consistency of the UI, as well as the exaggeration of the animations, as soon as possible.
Conclusion
I'm not saying we should go back to the old UI, I welcome the changes they are making. We are moving towards a new era of what is digital and what is not with the advancements in AR and VR. And I'm pretty sure the design team at Apple has put a lot of effort into this new design language and getting all us ready for the feature. At least this is what I want to believe for now.
I'm looking forward to see how this new design language will evolve over time. I'm sure it'll be a lot of fun to experiment with it as a designer. I think it's a great opportunity for us to grow and learn from the other's mistakes.
Hopefully we'll see a lot of improvements in the next few months and I'll be able to write a follow-up post about it, saying that I was wrong. I'm really looking forward to it.
Thanks for reading. Have a great day.