Apple’s translucent design replace for iOS 26, referred to as Liquid Glass, is now accessible to builders, with a public beta scheduled for subsequent month. The refresh—Apple’s first main interface overhaul in 10 years—makes app icons, buttons, menus, and pop-ups appear like they’re product of frosted glass, with blurred background colours peeking by means of.
The sweeping software program modifications are usually not only for iPhones. This glassy look—impressed by the working system within the Imaginative and prescient Professional headset—will finally roll out to the whole suite of Apple gadgets, from smartwatches to iPads.
Courtesy of Apple
After the WWDC 2025 keynote concluded on Monday, many design-focused builders WIRED spoke with have been impressed by the key replace, however had lingering questions on how this translucent look might impression readability for customers.
“It is exhausting to learn a few of it,” says Allan Yu, a product designer at present constructing the office messaging app Output. “Primarily as a result of I feel they made it too clear.” Yu suggests bumping up the blurring or adjusting the backgrounds to make on-screen designs extra readable.
“Much like the primary beta for iOS 7, what we’ve seen up to now is tough on the perimeters and probably veers into distracting or difficult to learn, particularly for customers with visible impairments,” says Josh Puckett, cofounder of Iteration, which helps startups with designs. Nonetheless, Puckett is optimistic, based mostly on Apple’s previous accessibility options, that readability will enhance over time.
Serhii Popov, a design-first software program engineer at MacPaw, the corporate behind the CleanMyMac app, is curious to see how the brand new working system will look on Macs in vivid mild conditions, the place glare already impacts visibility. However total, Popov is enamored with this “actually contemporary” look from Apple. “I feel it’ll make all the things look larger and mean you can learn or work together with the UI with extra consolation,” says Popov. For him, the brand new design and updates look particularly modern on iPads.
Past readability issues, the primary impression from some designers is that this new look may very well be unnecessarily distracting for customers.
“From a technical perspective, it is a very spectacular impact. I applaud the effort and time it will need to have taken to imitate refraction and dispersion of sunshine to such a excessive diploma,” says Adam Whitcroft, a designer at Proprietor.com, which makes apps and web sites for eating places. “However, sadly I have not seen a single instance of the place it is pulled off in a means that is complementary to the broader context it is introduced in.” Whitcroft factors to the dispersion and refraction of layers beneath the apps as visually distracting, particularly because the consumer interface is altering layouts. “For those who’ve designed a UI that pulls the eye of the attention away from the broader context, you’ve got gone down the mistaken path,” he says.
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