Quick Notes About WWDC 2025
Apple’s annual developer conference kicked off today with a keynote that announced:
- Unified Version 26 across all Apple platforms (iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS)
- “Liquid Glass” design system. A complete UI and UX overhaul, the first major redesign since iOS 7
- Apple Intelligence. Continued small improvements, though not the deep integration promised a year ago
- Full windowing system on iPadOS. Windows comes to iPad! Finally.
Of course, those are the very high-level highlights.
For designers, the headline is Liquid Glass. Sebastiaan de With’s predictive post and renderings from last week were very spot-on.
I like it. I think iOS and macOS needed a fresh coat of paint and Liquid Glass delivers.
There’s already been some criticism—naturally, because we’re opinionated designers after all!—with some calling it over the top, a rehash of Windows Vista, or an accessibility nightmare.
The new Liquid Glass design language acts like real glass, refracting light and bending the image behind it accordingly.
In case you haven’t seen it, it’s a visual and—albeit less so—experience overhaul for the various flavors of Apple OSes. Imagine a transparent glass layer where controls sit. The layer has all the refractive qualities of glass, bending the light as images pass below it, and its edges catching highlights from a light source. This is all powered by a sophisticated 3D engine, I’m sure. It’s gorgeous.
It’s been 12 years since the last major refresh, with iOS 7 bringing on an era of so-called flat design to the world. At the time, it was a natural extension of Jony Ive’s predilection for minimalism, to strip things to their core. What could be more pure than using only type? It certainly appealed to my sensibilities. But what it brought on was a universe of sameness in UI design.
The design team at Apple studied the physical properties of real glass to perfect the material in the new versions of the OSes.
With the release of Liquid Glass, led by Apple’s VP of Design, Alan Dye, I hope we’ll see designers add a little more personality, depth, and texture back into their UIs. No, we don’t need to return to the days of skeuomorphism—kicked off by Mac OS X’s Aqua interface design. I do think there's been a movement away from flat design recently. Even at the latest Config conference, Figma showed off functionality to add noise and texture into our designs. We've been in a flat world for 12 years! Time to add a little spice back in.
Finally, it’s a beta. This is typical of Apple. The implementation will be iterated on and by the time it ships later this year in September, it will have been further refined.
I do miss a good 4-minute video from Jony Ive talking about the virtues of software material design though…
