Liquid Glass

The main highlight of this year’s WWDC was definitely the new design language starring Liquid Glass. I’m not a huge fan of this new material but it is definitely interesting, and really reminds me of the old Aqua UI. These changes feel like they follow the same trend that Material 3 Expressive implemented, where previously solid blocks of color were replaced with nice glassy blurred backgrounds. However, since iOS already implemented blur in many places, it feels like Apple just felt like making the UI even more glassy, leading to the creation of a completely glass material.

Interactions surrounding Liquid Glass are super interesting as they represent a very different UI paradigm based on depth. Actions at the top and bottom of the screen are fixed in place, and perform Dynamic Island-esque transitions to transform to new states when the view changes. This change looks great with a nice viscous animation, but I don’t see the point in having view-dependent UI pieces not move with their respective view. The decision of what elements to make static is interestingly already different between iOS and Android, with a very key component—the tab bar. Compared to iOS, when entering a view in Android, the tab bar is hidden and thus is not global. However, the static tab bar in iOS is extremely different compared to the new static actions, since the tab bar by definition always has the same tabs available no matter the focused view.

The new app icons are really hit or miss. Most of them actually look great, but there are also the icons for Finder, TestFlight, and Xcode. Finder is pretty easy to dissect—they flipped the colors. I’m not really sure why they did this, since they could have definitely accommodated the glassy UI simply by making the background blue and layering a white half on top. For the TestFlight and Xcode icons, the main problem is black looking terrible in layered glass, but that could also be pretty easily fixed by changing those layers to white. Generally, I’m not a fan of the increased simplification of icons when users are already complaining about that. For macOS, the worst part is not allowing parts of icons to reach outside of the squircle confines, as that allowed for an interesting variety for certain tool-based applications. Now, macOS is going to have the same boring, uniform icons that have plagued iOS, especially with tinted icons looking a lot worse than the similar themed icons in Android.

I feel like the main significance of this design language change is the widespread nature of it, since it will presumably be coming to all supported iOS devices in a few months. This means that this new emphasized, opinionated design is going to be forced on a huge userbase without any opportunity for switching back to the old design. Those relying on reduced transparency or increased contrast are going to suffer greatly in this new design language, and are going to be unable to appreciate the glassy materials when it directly conflicts with their accessibility concerns. Also, apps with elements of the new design and interaction style like Photos in iOS 18, Sports, Journal, and Invites already haven’t been universally appreciated for their UX. With the Photos redesign in particular, I’ve heard many complaints about interaction changes from both posts I’ve read and in person. And if even the changes in Big Sur created a large response from the macOS community over moving to a marginally more glassy UI, Tahoe is going to have a much worse reaction from both general and power users.

Many of the changes need to be slowly examined and played with to appreciate them, which isn’t going to be a common action for people who are using devices with a certain intent. Components like switches don’t even show their glassy transitions unless they are held down, and other elements are just going to present themselves as distractions to people focused on a task. The lock screen clock that Apple showed beautifully transitioning between different heights is definitely going to be seen as a distraction when interacting with notifications, rather than a nice addition to the most commonly seen screen.

I don’t see how interaction problems could be easily fixed, as Apple already emphasizes animations over snappiness in general, and I doubt that is going to change in an update heavily focused on animations. Random transitions like moving between spaces in macOS already take 2x-3x longer than they need to, and there isn’t any way to change the duration without partially disabling SIP. If there was a way to opt into at least the most glassy parts of the new UI, it would allow having Aqua nostalgia while also accommodating those who want to use iOS and macOS more as a tool than an experience (which is a real use case to consider!). Right now, as with all macOS updates, there has to sadly be a consideration of the unavoidable consequences of upgrading, but it is of course much more severe for Tahoe.

I am quite excited to see the future of this design, especially with how universal it is across Apple platforms and apps. Apple has a large advantage over Google in that they strive to do large updates at once, instead of the terribly slow rollout of Material 3 Expressive that has been happening on the Android side (for me, one app—Gmail—has been updated with M3E, and only on my watch). After Google finally finishes their rollout in some timeframe hopefully shorter than five years, it’ll be interesting to compare general users’ perceptions of both of these opinionated design languages.