The problem with Apple’s new Liquid Glass design

Liquid Glass is a neat party trick. The new design system, which was built for nearly all of Apple’s products and is rolling out this week, is built on the idea that interfaces should be three-dimensional: in the world of Liquid Glass, buttons and menus sit on top of whatever you’re doing or looking at, changing color and refracting digital light like they’re physical objects. It’s meant to feel like glass does in the real world. It’s visually very impressive, and it all kind of works! You install it, you spend a minute fast-scrolling to see the buttons change, it’s very well done.

I’ve been using Liquid Glass, in Apple’s various betas, across a number of devices for the last couple of months. The system has actually gotten vastly better even in that short time: the menus that were once so translucent they were unreadable are now a little more frosted and a lot more legible. The most recent beta has still been decimating my iPhone 16’s battery life, but it seems to be getting better over time. It’s fine.

There’s just one ongoing problem with Liquid Glass: it’s the wrong idea. Apple is trying to make a single interface metaphor work absolutely everywhere, and it just doesn’t. Frankly, I’m not sure any all-encompassing design language could feel right on everything from a watch to a phone to a TV to a headset. But I do know that Liquid Glass in particular, which is hell-bent on making everything feel deep and physical and layered, often just feels like clutter. And it feels least at home on Apple’s most important and popular devices.

It’s all part of a trend within Apple right now toward a total collapse of the gaps between devices, in an attempt to make everything be everything to everyone all the time. This fall, your new software will also bring a full-featured Phone app to your Mac, a menu bar and Mac-like window management to the iPad, lots of widgets to basically all your screens, and lots of other features that make every device a little more like every other. Many of these are good and handy features! But it’s an enormous and somewhat surprising shift; from a company that has so long believed in using the right hardware for the right job, the context collapse is strange to watch.

Liquid Glass is emblematic of the whole effort, and makes clear all the ways it falls short. On a Vision Pro, for instance, the whole idea makes perfect sense: headset software should feel three-dimensional, as if you’re navigating the real and digital world together. All Liquid Glass is, really, is a way to see things through other things, so you don’t need an app switcher for the real world. In the Vision Pro, there should be no “interface,” only the things and world around you. Likewise, on the Mac, Liquid Glass mostly gets out of the way, because there’s not actually all that much system-created interface on a Mac. You’re in control of where things go and how you use them, so everything’s just a little more translucent.

On an iPhone, however, the whole idea breaks down. Because every app and experience is full-screen, you are constantly encountering the iPhone’s interface. You’re in and out of the homescreen, Control Center, and the notification shade. You’re switching between apps, you’re flipping through menus, you’re typing and tapping and moving around all the time. That’s fine! It’s just how the iPhone works. But Liquid Glass doesn’t seamlessly integrate buttons and menus with whatever you’re looking at. Since you see the whole screen at once, it just makes them glaringly obvious, since things constantly change color and size in front of your eyes. It’s not physical and digital aligning; it’s just a screen in front of another screen.

It’s also still way too easy for Liquid Glass to fall apart entirely. If you load a colorful webpage in the new Safari, you’ll barely be able to see the search bar that pops up over it. If you have a busy wallpaper or lockscreen, half your notifications will come through looking like a paint explosion. (A few days after installing the iOS 26 beta, I changed my wallpaper to black, and it made everything a little more bearable.) Even Apple’s own screenshots show menu options that are hard to read and icons that are hard to distinguish from one another.

It’s even worse in watchOS 26. The Apple Watch’s job is to be glanceable, to show you information succinctly and quickly, and Liquid Glass makes everything just a little harder to parse. I’ve never had such a hard time finding a watchface that works, since Liquid Glass loves to make the time blend in with the wallpaper seamlessly. I’m not looking for blend! I’m looking for the time. Any light “reflecting” off the screen just makes it harder to see.

Apple’s long-term bet here is pretty obvious. The company is clearly pushing toward a future in which AR glasses and VR headsets are completely mainstream. Liquid Glass might be the right idea for that world — we’ll probably want a system that makes the digital feel physical, that makes the clock widget on the wall look and feel more like a clock on the wall. In that future, we won’t have lots of devices with lots of different screens. The whole world will be a screen. The screen will be the world.

I don’t know if Apple’s right about the future, but that’s certainly not the world we live in right now. We live in a world with lots of screens, each one with different needs and strengths. Apple used to understand that better than anyone, and did a good job of building software that felt tuned to each device. And the last time it made such a sweeping change to its design ethos, iOS 7 was about creating a design that felt uniquely digital, ditching the industry’s skeuomorphism for something that actually interacted with and made sense on the device in your hand. Buttons don’t have to have drop shadows and borders because we know where the interface is. It wasn’t about pretending our screens were the world, but about embracing that they were screens.

Now Apple is swinging back the other way, not toward skeuomorphism but almost past it, into a sci-fi future that looks cool but doesn’t make sense. There is no real world on the other side of my iPhone screen. I don’t need it to obey physics or reflect light. Just show me the time.