Apple’s Liquid Glass effect in their upcoming iOS release is great news for anyone who doesn’t like to read bad news. The good news is—you won’t be able to read the news.
On June 9, 2025, Apple released a preview of their new design update that they’ve called Liquid Glass. iOS 26 features new icon and UI component styles with a refractive transparent effect that reacts to motion. Apple released a public beta on July 24th, which anyone can try out now. The full update will launch in fall 2025.
Here’s some predictions on what we’ll be hearing about the update in the future.
Users of older phones may be concerned about battery life.
The transparent aesthetic and responsive features of Apple’s Liquid Glass interface require more processing power than previous flat UIs. In this video by In Depth Tech Reviews of the earlier developer beta, the phone is observed to become as “warm as playing a heavy game.” iPhone users who are on older devices may reasonably be concerned about their phone’s battery life after the update given the fact that Apple has previously been accused of planned obsolescence in previous iOS releases. Users of older phones may want to read up on experiences of people using their same model before upgrading. However, iOS 26 does include new features to improve battery use which may extend battery life for all iPhone users.
Perhaps one reason for the decision to move from a flat design style to transparent overlays could be to get more people used to a UI style we may see in augmented reality glasses—one way or another, this update encourages consumers to buy new devices.
Accessibility debates will continue.
Let’s say you have no vision impairments, just got mostly a full night’s sleep, and it’s about time to wake up on a Tuesday morning. Your iPhone on your nightstand is vibrating with notifications. You roll over and pick up your phone to see what the day holds. You squint, trying to interpret the frosted white text over a frosted white overlay over a picture of your dog at the beach last summer. Do you care how nice the notifications appear to hover three-dimensionally over your phone’s lock screen background, shimmering as you tilt the angle of your phone? No. You just want to know The New York Times‘ headlines, what time is your first meeting of the morning, and what time is it now anyway?
The stylish transparent effects of Apple’s Liquid Glass are clearly not designed for people with impaired vision in mind. This design doesn’t just affect people with major impairments—it also detracts from the user experience of people who use glasses to read, people like me who get migraines, or really anyone who uses a phone in a situation (bright sunlight, tiredness, intoxication) that commonly makes it more difficult to decipher text. There are settings to turn off the transparency, but this is an imperfect solution, as discussed in this Youtube overview from the perspective of people with impaired vision.
“There’s a setting to turn it off” is probably not the best review you want to hear about your new, very expensive design feature. As the slick charm of the Liquid Glass look fades, many people are going to decide they’d actually prefer to read their phone notifications without squinting.
Designers will imitate Apple’s Liquid Glass with varying degrees of success.
Apple’s Liquid Glass will certainly influence design aesthetics for the coming months and years. For some nostalgia, we can look back at how Apple’s previous system aesthetics influenced UI design. In this blog, Jim Nielsen reviews designs that did a nifty job of adapting Apple’s style and those that made lazy or failed attempts to do so. Along with the release of the development beta of iOS 26, Apple also released a new (also beta) Icon Composer to help designers create app icons in Apple’s Liquid Glass style. (You can read some more about the pros and cons of it here.) The new Icon Composer may make app icon design much more consistent than previous generations. Figma has also released a plugin to help UI designers adopt Apple’s Liquid Glass style.
It’s clear that we’ll be seeing and hearing lots more about Apple’s Liquid Glass for iOS 26 in the months to come. Holiday shopping season is just around the corner and surely advertisement designs for the iPhone 17 will focus on this new aesthetic.
