As anticipated, today at its Worldwide Developer Conference Apple previewed a new software design that’s crafted with a new material called Liquid Glass.
This 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, according to Alan Dye, Apple’s vice president of Human Interface Design. For the very first time, the new design extends across platforms — iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 261 — to establish even more harmony while maintaining the distinct qualities that make each unique, he adds.
Described as Apple’s broadest software design update ever,” Liquid Glass “combines the optical qualities of glass with a fluidity only Apple can achieve, as it transforms depending on your content or context, according to Dye.
Here’s how Apple describes it: Inspired by the depth and dimensionality of visionOS, the new design takes advantage of Apple’s powerful advances in hardware, silicon, and graphics technologies. The new material, Liquid Glass, is translucent and behaves like glass in the real world. Its color is informed by surrounding content and intelligently adapts between light and dark environments. Born out of a close collaboration between the design and engineering teams, Liquid Glass uses real-time rendering and dynamically reacts to movement with specular highlights. This creates a lively experience that makes using iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV even more delightful.
This gorgeous new material extends from the smallest elements users interact with every day — like buttons, switches, sliders, text, and media controls — to larger elements, including tab bars and sidebars for navigating apps. It also shines in system experiences, such as the Lock Screen, Home Screen, notifications, Control Center, and more.
Controls, toolbars, and navigation within apps have been redesigned. Previously configured for rectangular displays, they now fit perfectly concentric with the rounded corners of modern hardware and app windows — establishing greater harmony between hardware, software, and content. Controls are crafted out of Liquid Glass and act as a distinct functional layer that sits above apps. They give way to content and dynamically morph as users need more options or move between different parts of an app. And with thoughtful groupings, it’s easier for users to find the controls they need.
Tab bars and sidebars have been redesigned with the same approach. In iOS 26, when users scroll, tab bars shrink to bring focus to the content while keeping navigation instantly accessible. The moment users scroll back up, tab bars fluidly expand. In iPadOS and macOS, updated sidebars make apps like Apple TV even more immersive. They refract the content behind them — while reflecting content and the user’s wallpaper from around them — which ensures users always have a sense of their context.
These updated design elements apply across fresh new experiences in apps such as Camera, Photos, Safari, FaceTime, Apple Music, Apple News, and Apple Podcasts. The new design extends across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS, with updates to system experiences like the Lock Screen, Home Screen, desktop, and Dock.
To maintain the focus on the subject of photo wallpapers on the Lock Screen, the time is now crafted out of Liquid Glass and fluidly adapts to fit elegantly behind the subject, according to Dye.
Icon Composer lets developers create Liquid Glass icons across platforms that render beautifully in light, dark, tinted, or clear looks.
For developers using SwiftUI, UIKit, and AppKit, an updated set of application programming interfaces are designed to make it easy to adopt the new design. By using Liquid Glass materials and the new and updated controls, developers have the opportunity to refresh the design of their apps to make every user interaction “even more intuitive and delightful,” according to Apple.
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