Grumbling about Liquid Glass
July 12, 2025
When Apple showed off their new Liquid Glass design language at WWDC in June, I was excited. I’m a sucker for shiny stuff, and I thought the refractive UI elements looked great as presented in the keynote.
But then several people shared screenshots of the design being difficult to read.
To me, the design looks best on iOS and iPadOS, but even there I have several gripes. I’m not a fan of how more UI elements float over content now, or how text gets blurred near element edges. This design was sold as “free[ing] up valuable space for your content”, 1 but I feel like there’s now overall less space where my content is in focus. This design also continues Apple’s obsession with hiding functionality in “UI junk drawers”. This makes the UI look better in a keynote, but it makes using your device more of a chore.
Fast forward a few weeks, and we now have iOS beta 3, which significantly dials back the transparency and refractive effects. It strips out a good deal of what initially excited me about the design, but leaves behind the same junk floating over my content. As pretty as the glass UI looked to me in the keynote, it turns out that it doesn’t make sense in the real world. I’m kind of surprised it made it out the door, and now it seems like we’re not going to get the design that Apple excitedly pitched.
There was a great discussion about the beta 3 changes on this week’s Connected (starting at the 47:20 mark). A major theme of the conversation went like this: obviously the design should be tweaked to make things more usable and accessible, but how could Apple’s design team not have accounted for these issues? The UI being transparent is a pretty fundamental part of “Liquid Glass”, don’t you think?
Of course fixes and tweaks are what the beta period is for. It also makes sense that there will be issues during platform-wide redesign. Design isn’t just making pretty images for a keynote, it has to work. But if the design needed to be dialled back this far, what was the point?
Like with Apple Intelligence last year, 2 I worry that year’s keynote might have sold us something that we’re not going to get. And if we don’t get it, it’s because it never made sense. This seems like a pretty big mark against Apple’s design leadership.
-
A cynical take I’ve heard is that this design was a way to distract from Apple Intelligence. I don’t buy that, but I think it might end up having the same effect anyway. Most iPhone users don’t follow news about Apple, and I’d bet this design will be a surprise. ↩