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When Apple unveiled Liquid Glass at WWDC25 on June 9, 2025, it promised a new way for software to feel alive: translucent surfaces that bend and reflect light, respond to touch, and let content influence the controls above it. Designers immediately saw the ambition—and questioned whether some surfaces were too transparent, distracting, and difficult to read.
The disagreement was not simply between people who like change and people who do not. Liquid Glass exposed a deeper design conflict: expressive interfaces can create depth and emotion, but the effects must remain subordinate to legibility, hierarchy, and accessibility.
What Apple introduced
Liquid Glass is a system-wide interface material, not a single iPhone feature. Apple introduced it across iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26.
It appears in controls, navigation elements, tab bars, toolbars, menus, icons, and other structural parts of the interface. Rather than behaving like a flat, fixed panel, the material is designed to respond to its surroundings. Apple describes Liquid Glass as bending, reflecting, and concentrating light; it can also change shape and respond to interaction. That makes it more than a conventional blur or a simple glassmorphism effect.
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The visual language has a clear relationship to the glass-like surfaces associated with visionOS, although Liquid Glass is not identical to visionOS. Apple’s aim was to extend a related sense of depth and continuity across its mainstream platforms.
Apple distinguishes between Clear Liquid Glass, which remains permanently transparent, and other variants that provide more separation from the content behind them. That distinction matters: transparency is not automatically useful just because it is visually striking.
Apple’s design rationale is that controls should feel connected to the content beneath them rather than appearing as opaque objects placed on top of it. The result can be elegant, but it also makes the quality of the background part of the interface’s readability.
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Why designers called it beautiful
The strongest argument for Liquid Glass is not that it looks new. It is that it makes software feel more physical and responsive.
After years of relatively flat and static interfaces, the material introduces more visible depth, motion, reflection, and atmosphere. A button can appear to react to touch. A toolbar can feel like a surface floating over the document it controls. Underlying color can create continuity rather than being hidden behind a solid block.
Some designers welcomed that expressive shift. Josh Puckett described the move away from flatness as bringing more feeling back to software surfaces. Serhii Popov found the look fresh, particularly on the iPad, where a larger display gives translucent layers more room to breathe. Larger screens such as the iPad and Mac can better accommodate the relationship between content and controls without forcing every element into a tiny space.
There is also a genuine technical achievement in simulating refraction and the dispersion of light while keeping the interface responsive. Adam Whitcroft acknowledged the sophistication of the effect even as he questioned whether it always served the user’s task. Admiring the rendering and approving every application of it are different judgments.
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Liquid Glass also gives Apple a stronger shared visual language. An iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch, and TV can feel related without being identical. For Apple, that consistency is valuable; for users, it can make platform transitions more familiar.
Where the readability problem begins
The criticism focused on specific failure modes rather than transparency in the abstract.
Transparency makes contrast unstable
A translucent control does not have one permanent background. Its appearance changes with a wallpaper, photograph, web page, notification, video frame, or surrounding interface. Text that is clear over a muted background can become difficult to distinguish when a bright or detailed image moves underneath it.
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Allan Yu argued that some early elements were simply too transparent and would benefit from more blur or stronger background treatment. Blur can preserve a sense of the content beneath a control while reducing the detail that competes with its label.
Thin details leave less room for error
Fine outlines, thin text, small icons, and delicate highlights may look polished in a keynote presentation. They are less dependable when viewed on a small screen, at a distance, under glare, or by someone with reduced vision.
The problem is especially serious for glanceable interaction. A user should be able to recognize a familiar control without stopping to interpret a changing combination of shape, reflection, contrast, and background detail. If the visual treatment asks users to inspect the interface before acting, it has added friction to a task that should be immediate.
Motion can compete with the task
Refraction and animation provide feedback, but movement can also attract attention away from the content being read. Whitcroft’s criticism was broader than “the glass is too faint”: even when technically impressive, the treatment could become the subject of attention instead of helping users understand what is actionable.
Small screens expose the trade-off
On a large iPad or Mac display, there is more space between content, controls, and competing layers. On an iPhone or Apple Watch, the same visual idea has fewer pixels in which to preserve contrast and separation. A material that feels atmospheric on a large screen may become crowded or ambiguous on a smaller one.
Bright environments reveal weaknesses
Serhii Popov questioned how the design would perform in bright light, particularly on Mac displays. Glare, reflections, and high ambient brightness can reduce the effective contrast of already-translucent controls. A screenshot or keynote video cannot establish how a design performs across every real-world lighting condition.
Accessibility is the decisive test
Accessibility is not an optional objection to an otherwise successful visual design. It is one of the best tests of whether the design works.
Low contrast can affect people with reduced vision, age-related visual changes, or color-vision differences. Changing backgrounds can make controls harder to identify. Motion and shifting visual layers may be uncomfortable for some users. Larger text can cause labels to wrap or occupy more of a translucent surface, changing the balance that a compact demonstration appears to achieve.
The relevant question is not merely whether Apple provides a switch. It is whether the default interface is dependable and whether its alternatives remain coherent and usable.
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That guidance recognizes an important distinction:
- Default usability: Can most users read and operate the interface without adjustment?
- Accessibility fallback: Does an alternative mode provide a genuinely usable interface rather than a visibly degraded one?
- Developer responsibility: Do third-party apps preserve hierarchy and contrast when using custom components?
- Contextual performance: Does the material remain legible over photos, video, bright content, and complex backgrounds?
An accessibility setting can mitigate a problem, but its existence does not prove that the original default was well designed.
Were the early reactions premature?
Partly. The first reactions came on June 9 and 10, 2025, when Liquid Glass was being shown in an early developer beta rather than a finished public release. TechCrunch reported that the earliest build looked unfinished, with notifications and Control Center drawing particular criticism.
Apple still had time to change opacity, blur, spacing, contrast, and animation. Some early screenshots therefore should not be treated as evidence of the final design.
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But “it is only a beta” does not make the questions irrelevant. A first beta reveals the design system’s priorities and its likely failure modes. If a visual language repeatedly creates problems with contrast, hierarchy, or distraction, those issues are structural enough to deserve attention even if individual implementation details can be polished.
The fairest conclusion is that early reactions were provisional but legitimate. Apple could refine the symptoms; the tension between expressive transparency and reliable legibility required a broader design response.
What Apple’s guidance asked developers to do
Apple’s later documentation makes clear that Liquid Glass is not a decorative overlay developers can apply indiscriminately.
The Human Interface Guidelines advises teams to use the material for controls and navigation while preserving the hierarchy between those elements and the underlying content. Developers should choose appropriate material variants, allow the system to adapt to settings, and design for changing backgrounds rather than assuming a fixed color.
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For a small app team, that creates a practical burden. The team may need to audit:
- Custom navigation bars, tab bars, toolbars, menus, and search interfaces.
- Text and icon contrast over light, dark, tinted, and highly varied backgrounds.
- Brand colors that change when placed inside adaptive materials.
- Dynamic Type, localization, and labels that wrap or expand.
- Reduce Transparency, Increase Contrast, Reduce Motion, and other system settings.
- Small-screen layouts where translucent layers have little room to separate.
- Custom controls that imitate Liquid Glass but do not inherit Apple’s accessibility behavior.
Apple also introduced Icon Composer, included with Xcode, for creating platform-consistent Liquid Glass icons. That may simplify a particular part of the transition, but it does not solve the larger question of whether a glass effect belongs in a specific interface.
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Native components can make adoption easier. Custom interfaces, especially those with dense data or strong branding, may require substantial testing and selective use of opaque surfaces. Developers do not have to redesign every app, and they should not adopt the material solely to look more like Apple.
What changed after the first beta?
The timeline matters:
- June 9, 2025: Apple announces Liquid Glass at WWDC25 for its major operating systems.
- June 9–10, 2025: Early developer-beta reactions raise concerns about transparency, Control Center, notifications, distraction, and accessibility.
- September 2025: The platform releases and more mature guidance provide a later implementation context. Apple’s materials guidance records a September 9, 2025 update.
- 2026: Apple continues refining the language. Apple’s WWDC26 developer material refers to a “refined look” of Liquid Glass.
This evidence supports “refined,” “adjusted,” and “continued to evolve.” It does not establish that Apple completely fixed the concerns or abandoned the original direction. Nor should the June beta be presented as though it were unchanged in the public release.
The later guidance itself is significant. It shows that successful Liquid Glass adoption depends on hierarchy, contrast, system settings, and background content—not just on rendering a convincing translucent surface.
How to judge Liquid Glass in practice
Whether the material succeeds depends less on how attractive it looks in isolation than on how it behaves under pressure.
| Criterion | Question to ask |
|---|---|
| Legibility | Can text and controls be identified immediately over varied content? |
| Hierarchy | Is it obvious what is content, navigation, and actionable control? |
| Adaptability | Does it work in light mode, dark mode, tinted mode, and bright conditions? |
| Accessibility | Do contrast, transparency, motion, and text-size settings produce usable results? |
| Glanceability | Can familiar controls be recognized without visual interpretation? |
| Platform fit | Does the treatment suit the available space on a Mac, iPhone, or Watch? |
| Implementation cost | Can a small team support the behavior without rebuilding every custom component? |
| Longevity | Will the effect still serve the task after its novelty fades? |
Test cases should include notifications over busy wallpapers, Control Center over photographs, changing web-page colors beneath translucent bars, bright outdoor use, larger text, localization, and users with low vision or motion sensitivity. Teams should also test their custom components rather than assume that an effect resembling Apple’s will respond correctly to system settings.
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Liquid Glass is useful because it makes a familiar argument visible. Expressive design can give software warmth, depth, and personality. Functional design must also make information stable, controls recognizable, and actions predictable.
Transparency and refraction are not inherently bad. They become problems when they weaken the distinction between foreground and background. Motion is not inherently distracting. It becomes distracting when it competes with reading or action. A shared platform language is not inherently uniform. It becomes limiting when every app is encouraged to imitate a material that does not suit its information density or brand.
The best implementation may therefore be selective. Productivity, medical, finance, enterprise, and other text-heavy apps may benefit from opaque or minimally translucent controls. A photo or media app may have more room to use atmospheric surfaces. The question is not whether an app contains Liquid Glass, but whether the material clarifies the relationship between the user’s content and the controls used to manipulate it.
FAQ
What is Apple’s Liquid Glass design?
Liquid Glass is a system-wide interface material introduced for Apple’s 2025 operating systems. It uses translucent, responsive surfaces for controls and navigation, with effects including refraction, reflection, and motion.
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Designers praised its visual ambition and technical execution but raised concerns that transparency, thin details, changing backgrounds, and motion could make controls harder to read or distract from a task.
Did Apple fix Liquid Glass after the first beta?
The dossier supports saying Apple refined and continued to evolve the design, but it does not establish that Apple completely fixed the concerns or abandoned the original direction. The early beta reactions should not be treated as a description of the unchanged public release.
Can Liquid Glass be made more accessible?
Apple’s guidance says the material should adapt to settings such as Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast. Developers still need to check that their interfaces preserve legibility, hierarchy, and usability across settings and backgrounds.
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