Liquid Glass
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Liquid Glass
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| Developer | Apple |
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| Introduced | June 9, 2025 (WWDC25) · shipped with the version-26 platforms |
| Type | Cross-platform design language — iOS · iPadOS · macOS · watchOS · tvOS · visionOS |
| Predecessors | iOS 7-era flat design · Aqua (Mac) |
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Liquid Glass is Apple's current design language — a translucent digital material that refracts what lies beneath it, introduced at WWDC 2025 as the biggest visual overhaul since iOS 7 and the first to unify all six platforms at once. Controls float as lensed glass over content, morphing between states, with visionOS's spatial windows as the acknowledged ancestor.
1 Reception and refinement✎
The June 2025 betas drew immediate legibility criticism — text over refraction is a hard problem — and Apple iterated in public, dialing transparency up and down across beta cycles and ultimately shipping a user-facing tint control in the 26.1 updates. The redesign's reach was the real story: one material system from the Apple Watch to the Mac, landing simultaneously with the platforms' renumbering to 26.
2 Position✎
Liquid Glass closes the flat-design decade and retires Aqua's lineage on the Mac. Strategically it is the visual signature of the Apple Intelligence era — a rendering-heavy design language that quietly presumes Apple silicon everywhere it runs.