#liquid-glass

#liquid-glass

Apple's Liquid Glass UI for iOS 26 is getting a lot of attention. Beyond the visual hype, it is also raising questions about accessibility and usability. Developers, however, are already trying to recreate the effect for the web and mobile interfaces. On iOS, Liquid Glass is backed by a rendering engine designed to generate high-fidelity, physics-like glass patterns efficiently. Web browsers do not expose this kind of native abstraction, but we do have SVG filters, which are powerful enough to approximate the same effect.

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.

CUPERTINO, Calif.-If you're buying one of the new iPhones or the other hardware that Apple announced today, your new devices will ship with Apple's latest operating system updates already installed. But if you're not looking to spend a bunch of money on Apple's latest and greatest, the new updates will land on Apple's other supported devices on September 15. Apple is shifting to a year-based numbering system starting this year, wiping away the previous grab bag of all-over-the-place version numbers.

Next month, Apple is rumored to debut a slimmed-down iPhone Air, breaking from the small design tweaks and spec bumps that have become routine at its launch events. The three-year plan will see its hardware change to mesh with the new Liquid Glass design in its next iOS update, as Bloomberg's Mark Gurman highlighted in his latest newsletter over the weekend.

The photos reveal a convex, bubble-shaped camera bump that looks like it's rising from the phone's back panel like a droplet of water.

Liquid Glass is a major UI rethink that will shape many coming generations of Apple products and could have a far-reaching impact on product UIs in general.