Designers

Apple’s translucent design update for iOS 26, called Liquid Glass, is now available to developers, with a public beta scheduled for next month. The refresh—Apple’s first major interface overhaul in 10 years—makes app icons, buttons, menus, and pop-ups look like they are made of frosted glass, with blurred background colors peeking through.

The sweeping software changes are not just for iPhones. This glassy look—inspired by the operating system in the Vision Pro headset—will eventually roll out to the entire suite of Apple devices, from smartwatches to iPads.

Courtesy of Apple

After the WWDC 2025 keynote concluded on Monday, many design-focused developers WIRED spoke with were impressed by the major update but had lingering questions about how this translucent look could impact readability for users.

“It’s hard to read some of it,” says Allan Yu, a product designer currently building the workplace messaging app Output. “Mainly because I think they made it too transparent.” Yu suggests bumping up the blurring or adjusting the backgrounds to make onscreen designs more readable.

“Similar to the first beta for iOS 7, what we’ve seen so far is rough on the edges and potentially veers into distracting or challenging to read, especially for users with visual impairments,” says Josh Puckett, cofounder of Iteration, which helps startups with designs. Still, Puckett is optimistic, based on Apple’s past accessibility features, that readability will improve over time.

Controls and navigation transform as you interact with the user interface.

Courtesy of Apple

Serhii Popov, a design-first software engineer at MacPaw, the company behind the CleanMyMac app, is curious to see how the new operating system will look on Macs in bright light situations, where glare already impacts visibility. But overall, Popov is enamored with this “really fresh” look from Apple. “I think it will make everything look bigger and allow you to read or interact with the UI with more comfort,” says Popov. For him, the new design and updates look especially sleek on iPads.

Beyond readability concerns, the first impression from some designers is that this new look could be unnecessarily distracting for users.

“From a technical perspective, it’s a very impressive effect. I applaud the time and effort it must have taken to mimic refraction and dispersion of light to such a high degree,” says Adam Whitcroft, a designer at Owner.com, which makes apps and websites for restaurants. “But, sadly I haven’t seen a single example of where it’s pulled off in a way that’s complementary to the broader context it’s presented in.” Whitcroft points to the dispersion and refraction of layers beneath the apps as visually distracting, especially as the user interface is changing layouts. “If you’ve designed a UI that draws the attention of the eye away from the wider context, you’ve gone down the wrong path,” he says.

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