Apple’s new Liquid Glass is meant to dynamically transform to help bring greater focus to content, delivering a new level of vitality across controls, navigation, app icons, widgets, and more. For the very first time, the new design extends across platforms — iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26 — to establish even more harmony while maintaining the distinct qualities that make each unique.
Mark Wilson for Fast Company:
Still, Apple knows that people rely on their iPhones for everything, and they can’t wholesale change the way people use the most important device in their lives. That’s why Liquid Glass is less a deconstruction of iOS than a luxe reskin—replacing chunks of iOS piece by piece rather than revolutionizing it, for now.
It’s a toe-dipping sensibility that I appreciate. Moving fast and breaking things is crucial for fundraising and devastating for real life. Apple may serve its customers better by being careful, adjusting its designs little by little, more like a car company than a tech startup.
Unfortunately, Apple still didn’t nail Liquid Glass out of the gate. And it doesn’t help that, rumor has it, the company put a tight deadline on itself, only developing Liquid Glass for six months before its announcement.
While Liquid Glass is full of interesting ideas and some truly gorgeous animation work from Apple’s still-unparalleled technicians, experts I spoke to pointed out that it was inconsistently implemented, and they believe it will make life worse for a lot of its users. They say its cognitive load (think of it as the invisible tax on your brain) is higher across the board than its previous UX. Specifically, its low contrast design—which often blurs the distinction between the phone’s background and its messages in the foreground—will prove difficult for older adults, especially, to read.
If one core idea has promise inside Liquid Glass, it’s that Apple is introducing stretchable, reshapable buttons and new animations, which can break out of the more static menu bars we’ve known for so long.
Basically, it’s what you could call the “liquid” half of “Liquid Glass…”
Liquid UIs don’t work consistently yet, but in theory, they make a lot of sense. Perhaps more problematic for Apple is the “glass” part. At launch, critics pointed out two issues. The first was that it failed to add new functionality to the phone. The second was more ironic: Glass’s fatal flaw is the clarity with which it depicts information.
Legibility is still of concern to every UX specialist I talked to for this piece. They flagged that Liquid Glass presents a significant challenge to cognitive load and creates accessibility issues where there were none in the OS before. In some spots, like the beautiful magnifier tool that helps you highlight words, the glass distortion effects are simply joyful. In many others, they muddle information and make it harder to understand what you’re looking at.
MacDailyNews Take: Liquid Glass is a six-month rush job because it’s meant to be a shiny object to distract from the current lack of Apple Intelligence innovations as that catch-up work continues, BUT, Liquid Glass shows much promise!
Yes, Liquid Glass sometimes presents legibility issues, but those can be solved and, likely, are being solved as you read this.
When, not if, Apple launches a Siri — or whatever name with which they, hopefully, rebrand it; “Siri” is just too tarnished at this point — that is not an abject neglected embarrassment (reportedly by WWDC next June, at the very latest), Liquid Glass will be much further along and a lot of the current readability issues will have been tackled.
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