Liquid Glass Pours Out to Apple Devices Today ⇥ wired.com

Craig Grannell, Wired:

Apple revealed Liquid Glass as part of its WWDC announcement this June, with all the pomp usually reserved for shiny new gear. The press release promised a “delightful and elegant new software design” that “reflects and refracts its surroundings while dynamically transforming to bring greater focus to content.” Today it launches globally onto compatible Apple devices.

If you haven’t encountered it yet, brace yourself. Inspired by visionOS — the software powering the Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset — Liquid Glass infuses every Apple platform with a layered glass aesthetic. This is paired with gloopy animations and a fixation on hiding interface components when possible—and showing content through them when it isn’t.

Grannell interviewed several developers for this piece, which is ultimately quite critical of Liquid Glass.

I, too, have thoughts, but life got in the way of completing anything by today’s release. Luckily, there is no shortage of people with opinions about this new material and the broader redesign across Apple’s family of operating systems. I trust you will find their commentary adequate, and I hope you will still be interested in mine whenever I can finish.

In the meantime, I think a chunk of [Dan Moren’s iOS 26 review][dm], for Six Colors, is quite good:

Apple has designed extensive rules to try and minimize some of the most distracting impacts of Liquid Glass. For example, if you’re viewing black-on-white content and suddenly scroll past a darker image, the UI widgets will only flip from light to dark mode based on the speed of your scrolling: scroll past it quickly and they won’t flip; it’s only if you slow down or stop with the widgets over the image that they’ll shift into dark mode.

While clever, this also feels remarkably over-engineered to work around the fundamental nature of these devices. It’s a little reminiscent of the old apocryphal story about how the American space industry spent years and millions of dollars designing a pen that could write in space while the Soviets used a pencil. Perhaps they should have used a design that doesn’t require adjusting its look on the fly.

Also, Federico Viticci has published his extraordinary annual review. In addition to the section on design, I am also looking forward to his thoughts in particular on iPadOS 26. Lots to read and lots to discover.