Breaking Down Apple’s Liquid Glass: The Tech, The Hype, and The Reality

I kind of expected it: a lot more ink was spilled on Liquid Glass—particularly on social media. In case you don’t remember, Liquid Glass is the new UI for all of Apple’s platforms. It was announced Monday at WWDC 2025, their annual developers conference.

The criticism is primarily around legibility and accessibility. Secondary reasons include aesthetics and power usage to animate all the bubbles.

How Liquid Glass Actually Works

Before I go and address the criticism, I think it would be great to break down the team’s design thinking and how Liquid Glass actually works. 

I watched two videos from Apple’s developer site. Much of the rest of the article is a summary of the videos. You can watch them and skip to the end of this piece.

First off is this video that explains Liquid Glass in detail.

As I watched the video, one thing stood out clearly to me: the design team at Apple did a lot of studying of the real world before digitizing it into UI.

The Core Innovation: Lensing

Instead of scattering light like previous materials, Liquid Glass dynamically bends and shapes light in real-time. Apple calls this “lensing.”

It’s their attempt to recreate how transparent objects work in the physical world. We all intuitively understand how warping and bending light communicates presence and motion. Liquid Glass uses these visual cues to provide separation while letting content shine through.

A Multi-Layer System That Adapts

This isn’t just a simple effect. It’s built from several layers working together:

• Highlights respond to environmental lighting and device motion. When you unlock your phone, lights move through 3D space, causing illumination to travel around the material.
• Shadows automatically adjust based on what’s behind them—darker over text for separation, lighter over solid backgrounds.
• Tint layers continuously adapt. As content scrolls underneath, the material flips between light and dark modes for optimal legibility.
• Interactive feedback spreads from your fingertip throughout the element, making it feel alive and responsive.

All of this happens automatically when developers apply Liquid Glass.

Two Variants (Frosted and Clear)

Liquid Glass has the same two types of material.

• Regular is the workhorse—full adaptive behaviors, works anywhere.
• Clear is more transparent but needs dimming layers for legibility.

Clear should only be used over media-rich content when the content layer won’t suffer from dimming. Otherwise, stick with Regular.

It’s like ice cubes—cloudy ones from your freezer versus clear ones at fancy bars that let you see your drink’s color.

Smart Contextual Changes

When elements scale up (like expanding menus), the material simulates thicker glass with deeper shadows. On larger surfaces, ambient light from nearby content subtly influences the appearance.

Elements don’t fade—they materialize by gradually modulating light bending. The gel-like flexibility responds instantly to touch, making interactions feel satisfying.

This is something that’s hard to see in stills.

The New Tinting Approach

Instead of flat color overlays, Apple generates tone ranges mapped to content brightness underneath. It’s inspired by how colored glass actually works—changing hue and saturation based on what’s behind it.

Apple recommends sparing use of tinting. Only for primary actions that need emphasis. Makes sense.

Design Guidelines That Matter

Liquid Glass is for the navigation and controls layer floating above content—not for everything. Don’t add Liquid Glass to or make content areas Liquid Glass. Never stack glass on glass.

Accessibility features are built-in automatically—reduced transparency, increased contrast, and reduced motion modify the material without breaking functionality.

The Legibility Outcry (and Why It’s Overblown) 

“Legibility” was mentioned 13 times in the 19-minute video. Clearly that was a concern of theirs. Yes, in the keynote, clear tinted device home screens were shown and many on social media took that to be an accessibility abomination. Which, yes, that is. But that’s not the default. 

The fact that the system senses the type of content underneath it and adjusts accordingly—flipping from light to dark, increasing opacity, or adjusting shadow depth—means they’re making accommodations for legibility.

Maybe Apple needs to do some tweaking, but it’s evident that they care about this.

And like the 18 macOS releases before Tahoe—this version—accessibility settings and controls have been built right in. Universal Access debuted with Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar in 2002. Apple has had a long history of supporting customers with disabilities, dating all the way back to 1987.

So while the social media outcry about legibility is understandable, Apple’s track record suggests they’ll refine these features based on real user feedback, not just Twitter hot takes.

The Real Goal: Device Continuity

Why and what is Liquid Glass meant to do? It’s unification. With the new design language, Apple has also come out with a new design system. This video presented by Apple designer Maria Hristoforova lays it out.

Hristoforova says that Apple’s new design system overhaul is fundamentally about creating seamless familiarity as users move between devices—ensuring that interface patterns learned on iPhone translate directly to Mac and iPad without requiring users to relearn how things work. The video points out that the company has systematically redesigned everything from typography (hooray for left alignment!) and shapes to navigation bars and sidebars around Liquid Glass as the unifying foundation, so that the same symbols, behaviors, and interactions feel consistent across all screen sizes and contexts. 

The Pattern of Promised Unity

This isn’t Apple’s first rodeo with “unified design language” promises.

Back in 2013, iOS 7’s flat design overhaul was supposed to create seamless consistency across Apple's ecosystem. Jony Ive ditched skeuomorphism for minimalist interfaces with translucency and layering—the foundation for everything that followed.

OS X Yosemite (2014) brought those same principles to desktop. Flatter icons, cleaner lines, translucent elements. Same pitch: unified experience across devices.

macOS Big Sur (2020) pushed even further with iOS-like app icons and redesigned interfaces. Again, the promise was consistent visual language across all platforms.

And here we are in 2025 with Liquid Glass making the exact same promises. 

But maybe “goal” is a better word.

Consistency Makes the Brand

I’m OK with the goal of having a unified design language. As designers, we love consistency. Consistency is what makes a brand. As Apple has proven over and over again for decades now, it is one of the most valuable brands in the world. They maintain their position not only by making great products, but also by being incredibly disciplined about consistency.

San Francisco debuted 10 years ago as the system typeface for iOS 9 and OS El Capitan. They’ve since extended it and it works great in marketing and in interfaces.

The rounded corners on their devices are all pretty much the same radii. Now that concentricity is being incorporated into the UI, screen elements will be harmonious with their physical surroundings. Only Apple can do that because they control the hardware and the software. And that is their magic.

Design Is Both How It Works and How It Looks

In 2003, two years after the iPod launched, Rob Walker of The New York Times did a profile on Apple. The now popular quote about design from Steve Jobs comes from this piece.

[The iPod] is, in short, an icon. A handful of familiar clichés have made the rounds to explain this — it’s about ease of use, it’s about Apple's great sense of design. But what does that really mean? “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s C.E.O. “People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” 

People misinterpret this quote all the time to mean design is only how it works. That is not what Steve meant. He meant, design is both what it looks like and how it works.

Steve did care about aesthetics. That’s why the Graphic Design team mocked up hundreds of PowerMac G5 box designs (the graphics on the box, not the construction). That’s why he obsessed over the materials used in Pixar’s Emeryville headquarters. From Walter Isaacson’s biography:

Because the building’s steel beams were going to be visible, Jobs pored over samples from manufacturers across the country to see which had the best color and texture. He chose a mill in Arkansas, told it to blast the steel to a pure color, and made sure the truckers used caution not to nick any of it.

Liquid Glass is a welcomed and much-needed visual refresh. It’s the natural evolution of Apple’s platforms, going from skeuomorphic so users knew they could use their fingers and tap on virtual buttons on a touchscreen, to flat as a response to the cacophony of visual noise in UIs at the time, and now to something kind of in-between.

Humans eventually tire of seeing the same thing. Carmakers refresh their vehicle designs every three or four years. Then they do complete redesigns every five to eight years. It gets consumers excited. 

Liquid Glass will help Apple sell a bunch more hardware.