Apple has a new design language called Liquid Glass

Apple’s new glassy interface: How much do we really need? How much will we learn from the advances of Liquid Glass and Windows Aero?

The ideas behind both Liquid Glass and Windows Aero are good. They stand for personalization, customization, for helping people figure out where they are and what they’re doing on their device. The demos we saw today at the WWDC suggest that this effect will work across all of Apple’s devices, which is something we have not seen before. I don’t think Liquid Glass will matter in the grand scheme of things. We might get more in the months to come, and maybe developers figure out how to make the best of the layers. There will be a lot of places that look like a mess with this sort of textured translucency. It won’t change much about how you use your devices or the way you perceive them, and at least to my eyes, it doesn’t even make them better-looking. It’s just … slightly different.

Aqua, which appeared in iMovie 2 in 2000, is one of the reasons why Apple has also used glass themes in the past. A redesign to the macOS user interface was introduced, with rounded corners, more transparent layers, and a slew of new icons.

Microsoft has also been using transparency effects in its Windows operating system since it launched Windows Vista in 2007, complete with its own Aero Glass theme. The current version of Windows 11 now uses Microsoft’s Fluent Design language, which increasingly has more of a focus on 3D, colorful, and playful elements.

Design, to quote a wildly overused Steve Jobs-ism, is how it works. The new design language Apple just announced, called Liquid Glass, is not a new one at all.

It isn’t a surprise that most of the Apple devices aren’t putting digital information on the physical world. They’re just screens! When you highlight something on a page, you will feel like you poking at a fake water droplets on the screen, since the little glass loupe that slides over text will not feel like you are moving anything. The controls that seem to float slightly above your content appear to look just like a hokey 3D effect to me. The navigation buttons that ripple as you scroll on a webpage look busy and hard to read. Apple executives often made a point of emphasizing Liquid Glass’s minimalist design and minimalist interface, but the interface feels more noticeable as it constantly changes.

In that broadest sense, this is where Apple got its start. It obviously wouldn’t, and probably couldn’t, fundamentally change the look and feel of every device it makes for billions of users around the world. No one wants that. In order to make them universal, Apple took all of its elements and made them less focused on a certain screen size. The menu of black and white icons is pretty much what works in most places. Apple doesn’t have to change the menu for every device and screen orientation because it has lists that pop out of buttons. Liquid Glass is the lowest common denominator, done about as well as you could.

I can show you how much it changes things. On the left is a picture of my lock screen that I uploaded to David’s Installer newsletter last month, and on the right is the lockscreen that was put into my device after the developer beta was released.

The Control Center is a mess right now. The transparency of Liquid Glass makes it look cluttered, and that’s even with my gray homescreen. I hope Apple makes everything under the Control Center more clear so that you don’t have to look at it.

The Clock app shows a good example of the finer details that have changed. The bottom bar is rounded, and when you use a different tab the animation changes into a water droplets moving across the top bar. You can drag it across the tab bar if you press and hold the droplet. You might also notice that the button to turn the alarm on and off is more oval than circular.

My iPhone still functions like it used to. There are a lot of small complaints regarding the spacing of settings functions and the Control Center. But I expect Apple will tweak and fix a lot of the bigger issues ahead of the official launch of iOS 26 this fall.