Liquid Glass Turns One. We're Still Squinting.

My parents renovated their bathroom in 2019. They saw a design show where everything was frosted glass — the shower door, the cabinet panels, the partition wall. It looked stunning on TV. Expensive hotel energy.

Six months later, nobody in the family could tell which cabinet had the towels. My dad kept walking into the shower partition because the edge blended into the wall behind it. The dog was confused. Everyone was confused.

That bathroom is Liquid Glass.

Happy Birthday to the Most Divisive Design Language Since iOS 7

One year ago, Apple walked on stage at WWDC 2025 and told us the future of UI was translucent. Everything would shimmer. Everything would refract. Tab bars would glow. Navigation would float. Your entire interface would look like it was rendered inside a soap bubble engineered by Jony Ive’s ghost.

The internet immediately split into two camps: people who thought it was beautiful, and people who thought it was unreadable. Twelve months later, both camps are still right.

Here’s where we actually are.

The Numbers Tell Two Stories

Apple launched a curated design gallery last November showcasing third-party apps that adopted Liquid Glass. They updated it again in April 2026 with more examples. Slack is there. CNN. Crumbl. Fantastical. AllTrails. Trello.

Sounds like a lot, right?

It’s just over a dozen apps out of an App Store with millions of titles. These are teams with the resources, incentives, or ambition to rebuild around native controls from scratch. They’re outliers, not the mainstream.

Apple knows this. You don’t build a promotional gallery because adoption is going great. You build one because you need a brochure to convince the rest of the class.

The apps that did adopt it show real improvements. Slack accelerated its roadmap and gained landscape support as a downstream benefit. CNN and Crumbl found that content-first layouts produce genuinely better designs. Tide Guide managed to extend a coherent design across iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS.

So the technology works — when you have a team of senior designers and six months to spare.

The Readability Problem Hasn’t Gone Away

The Nielsen Norman Group — the gold standard of UX research — published a thorough teardown of Liquid Glass that reads like a medical report. Their diagnosis wasn’t subtle.

Transparency means anything layered on top of something else becomes harder to see. In Mail, the search bar sits on top of message previews. Text on text. In Apple Maps, icons blend into background imagery. In Safari, the URL bar is truncated and hard to read.

Tab bars got crowded. Touch targets shrank below the recommended 1cm threshold. The forward button in Safari plays peek-a-boo — sometimes it’s there, sometimes it isn’t. Controls animate for no functional reason. Carousel dots morph. Buttons pulsate.

NN/Group’s assessment was essentially: this looks like it was designed for screenshots, not for use.

And if you’ve ever tried reading a notification on your Lock Screen while walking in sunlight, you already know they’re right.

What Apple Actually Fixed (and What They Didn’t)

To be fair, Apple didn’t ignore the feedback. During the iOS 26 beta cycle, they made incremental adjustments. The Control Center became more opaque after the first beta made it nearly unreadable. Shadows and transparency effects were tuned through multiple updates. iOS 26.2 added new settings options that gave users some control back.

But they never gave users an off switch. And they never gave developers one either.

The Reduce Transparency accessibility toggle helps — it makes the glass effect frostier and more opaque. But it’s a system-wide setting, not something developers can tune per-view. You either get the full soap bubble or you get a frosted pane. There’s no middle ground.

For developers who care about accessibility, this creates an awkward situation: Liquid Glass does respond to system-level accessibility settings automatically, which is good. But the default state — the state 95% of users see — still prioritizes shimmer over legibility.

The GPU Problem Nobody Talks About

Here’s something buried in Apple’s own documentation that tells you everything about the real engineering cost: glass effects are GPU-intensive and shouldn’t be nested in scrollable areas or lists.

Read that again. Apple’s own design language comes with a performance warning for one of the most common UI patterns in mobile development — scrolling lists.

If you’re building a productivity app, a messaging app, a social feed, or basically anything that scrolls, you need to be careful about where you apply glass effects. Nest too many translucent views and your frame rate drops. On older devices, this isn’t theoretical — it’s visible.

This is the equivalent of a car company shipping a new steering wheel and then saying “just don’t turn it too often.”

iOS 27 Is Doubling Down

With WWDC 2026 two weeks away, the rumors are clear: Liquid Glass isn’t going anywhere. In fact, iOS 27 is expected to extend it further.

The one concession? A system-wide intensity slider. Users will reportedly be able to adjust how much glass effect they see across the entire operating system. Originally planned for iOS 26 but delayed due to technical challenges, this slider is finally expected to ship.

It’s the “volume knob for visual noise” that users have been demanding. And it’s a tacit admission from Apple that yes, they went too far and needed a dial-back mechanism.

For developers, this means your UI needs to look good at multiple glass intensity levels. If your app was carefully designed around the full Liquid Glass effect, it might look odd when a user cranks it down to 30%. If you leaned into heavy translucency for your onboarding flow, test it with the slider at minimum.

This is going to be the new “dark mode testing” — another configuration matrix to validate.

The Cross-Platform Pain

If you’re a native SwiftUI or UIKit developer, Liquid Glass adoption is relatively straightforward. Apple provides UIGlassEffect for UIKit and .glassEffect() modifiers for SwiftUI. The APIs exist. The documentation is decent. The Design Gallery gives you examples to reference.

But the App Store isn’t all native Swift apps.

Flutter developers had to rely on community-built packages because the framework’s design system libraries were being rearchitected at launch. React Native teams faced similar challenges. Even on macOS, independent observers counted at least four distinct border-radius sizes — Apple’s updated first-party apps, unupdated third-party apps, partially updated apps like Terminal, and browsers like Chrome each render window corners differently.

The visual consistency Apple promised only exists if every developer rebuilds their app with native controls. In reality, the ecosystem looks like a neighborhood where half the houses got renovated and the other half still have vinyl siding.

What You Should Actually Do Before WWDC

If you’re an iOS developer preparing for iOS 27, here’s the practical advice:

Test with Reduce Transparency on. Always. Not just at the end — during development. If your UI works with reduced transparency, it’ll work everywhere.

Don’t nest glass in scroll views. Apple literally tells you not to. Listen to them. Use glass for tab bars, toolbars, and navigation elements. Use solid backgrounds for list items and content cells.

Audit your contrast ratios. The WCAG AA minimum for normal text is 4.5:1. With a translucent background, your ratio changes depending on what’s behind it. Test your text against your actual backgrounds, not a solid preview.

Prepare for the intensity slider. When iOS 27 drops the beta on June 8, test your app at every slider position. Build it into your QA checklist now. We put together a full WWDC 2026 developer preflight checklist if you want to make sure you’re covering all bases.

If you’re building with SwiftUI, our SwiftUI courses cover modern layout techniques that work well with glass effects and adaptive designs. Getting your architecture right means design changes like Liquid Glass become configuration, not reconstruction.

The Bigger Picture

The Liquid Glass saga is really a story about Apple’s relationship with its developer community. Apple ships a bold design vision. Developers and users push back. Apple makes incremental fixes but never fundamentally changes course. Everyone adjusts. The cycle repeats.

We saw it with iOS 7’s flat design overhaul in 2013. We saw it with the notch. We’re seeing it now with Liquid Glass. And if the rumors about the foldable iPhone are true, we’ll see it again when Apple asks us to design for a hinge.

The pattern isn’t bad, exactly. It’s just exhausting. Every year, developers burn cycles adapting to Apple’s aesthetic decisions while the platform problems — Swift’s growing complexity, Siri’s delayed overhaul, the still-half-baked Apple Intelligence — keep piling up.

Liquid Glass is genuinely pretty. I don’t hate it. When it works — in a weather app showing a sunrise, in a music player with album art bleeding through — it creates moments of real beauty.

But pretty doesn’t mean readable. And readable is what ships.

One Year In

My parents eventually added labels to the bathroom cabinets. Little brass plates that said “towels” and “medicine” and “cleaning supplies.” It was a small concession that solved 90% of the usability problems while keeping the aesthetic.

Apple’s intensity slider is their brass label. A quiet acknowledgment that beauty needs guardrails.

The question now is whether iOS 27 gives developers enough tools to build those guardrails themselves — or whether we’ll be back here next year, squinting at another set of translucent tab bars, wondering which icon is the settings gear and which one is a decorative blob.

WWDC is June 8. We’ll find out soon enough.

Building iOS apps that need to survive design language shifts? Our SwiftUI at Scale course teaches architecture patterns that make your app resilient to exactly these kinds of platform changes. And if you’re using AI tools to speed up your UI work, PromptKit helps you manage and optimize your prompts across Claude, ChatGPT, and other models — so you spend less time tweaking and more time shipping.