First Apple added dark mode icons, then it gave us tinted icons. Now, Apple has made its stance on the future of icons clear with the introduction of Liquid Glass.
If you watched the WWDC 2025 keynote on Monday, you probably heard the phrase “Liquid Glass” being thrown around quite a bit. Liquid Glass is Apple’s newest design language; it doesn’t just apply to one operating system — it was designed to unify them all.
That’s right. It’s shared across macOS, watchOS, visionOS, tvOS, iPadOS, and, of course, iOS. While it’s not identical on each platform, it does certainly make them more similar than it does different.
Still, most people will interface with Liquid Glass on their iPhone first when iOS 26 drops in fall 2025.
So, just what is Liquid Glass?
In Apple’s own words, it’s a “translucent material reflects and refracts its surroundings, while dynamically transforming to help bring greater focus to content, delivering a new level of vitality across controls, navigation, app icons, widgets, and more.”
That’s a lot of words for saying “our designers made a lot of the interface transparent,” which is largely what it is. But, it wouldn’t be Apple if they didn’t use 31 words where eight would have sufficed.
And yet, I’m going to give them a little bit of credit — just a little. I personally liked Sebastiaan de With’s prediction a little better than Apple’s reality, but the two aren’t that far apart.
Liquid Glass is, in fact, more than just making parts of the interface clear. Apple says that it tried to integrate the software and hardware in a way that feels intuitive and beautiful.
It’s designed to blend away into the background and put the focus on your content. Menus become contextual and buttons hide away when not needed.
And yes, if you want, you can make your icons all clear. Which, admittedly, I think is neat and I will absolutely be doing that.
Whether or not you feel the same way, unfortunately, is pretty subjective. I remember the leap between iOS 6 and iOS 7.
In fact, I know people who are — to this day — mad about that leap. However, that was not me.
I hated iOS 1 through iOS 6. I also hated the leap from Windows 98 to Windows XP — it’s me, the insufferable little tech minimalist.
I welcome Apple’s Liquid Glass era. I’m sure I’m not alone, but I suspect there will be a fair amount of people who will roll their eyes and groan.
At the very least, though, I do not think the jump between iOS 18 and iOS 28 — that still feels stupid to say, by the way — is going to feel as big as the jump from iOS 6 to iOS 7.
So at least anyone digging their heels in can take solace in that fact, I suppose.
Accessibility concerns
That isn’t to say that it’s perfect, though. While I am, in fact, somewhat dyslexic, I am blessed with eyesight that is good enough to not need physical correction — yet.
This means, for the most part, stylistic choices of interfaces are a matter of preference, not a matter of usability. Again, for the most part.
But there are millions — about 8.3 million, according to The Center for Research on Disability — of Americans who would classify themselves as blind or low-vision affected individuals.
And, vision impairment, like most things, is a spectrum. Total blindness, which means a person cannot perceive light or any form, is actually pretty rare.
About 93% of those who are considered “blind” as the common seeing individual understands it, have some degree of vision.
And for a lot of blind and low-vision folks, they’ve figured out how to use their devices. A lot of the time that means doing some pretty simple stuff, like increasing text size, boosting brightness, and increasing contrast.
Of course, some of these fixes have less impact if the interface is, you know — a bunch of transparent glass-like icons.
Fortunately, I suspect that Apple has already thought about their low- and no-vision users. I anticipate that they’ll still have access to all the accessibility features you can currently find in settings.
And, unsurprisingly — you don’t need to set your icons to transparent. You can set them to light mode, dark mode, or tinted.
So yes, Liquid Glass is new, and there are going to be people who don’t love it. Fortunately, I don’t think Apple’s really leaving anyone out.
This story originally appeared on Appleinsider
