At WWDC 2025 today, Apple announced a sweeping software redesign for almost all of its products. As well as a fresh look, the new “Liquid Glass” design language aims to achieve consistency in the interfaces of the iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Vision Pro.
As the name suggests, the unifying theme is glass. Panes, windows, buttons, and menus are presented as translucent layers with specular highlights. These layers change color to reflect the content beneath as you scroll, and you can often make out blurred and refracted elements of the background through the top layer. This should make the onscreen furniture feel deeper and realer, more like a physical world you’re interacting with. (It could be argued that this is the opposite of what Apple did with iOS 7, when reality-mimicking skeuomorphic design was banished.) It might also just be more attractive and fun to use.
Apple
Shapes across the new interfaces tend more towards the curved than the flat. Apple already favored squircles and other rounded-corner shapes in its OSes, but menus and interfaces will more commonly be separated from the edges of the screen and split out as standalone lozenges. These shrink as you scroll “to bring focus to the content,” Apple says, and then return to their original size when you stop.
As well as the central interfaces of the operating systems themselves, these changes affect Apple apps such as Safari, FaceTime, Camera, Photos, Apple Music, Apple News, and Apple Podcasts.
“This is our broadest software design update ever,” said Alan Dye, Apple’s vice president of Human Interface Design. “Meticulously crafted by rethinking the fundamental elements that make up our software, the new design features an entirely new material called Liquid Glass. It combines the optical qualities of glass with a fluidity only Apple can achieve, as it transforms depending on your content or context. It lays the foundation for new experiences in the future and, ultimately, it makes even the simplest of interactions more fun and magical.”
Apple
Explaining the decision, software engineering VP Craig Federighi boldly referred to the iOS 7 redesign 12 years ago–the last time Apple made a radical change to the iPhone interface. iOS 7 was a hugely influential launch, not just on other Apple products but on other companies, but at the time it was deeply unpopular. Software interfaces need to be easy to use. A truly great OS can be intuitive from the first moment you try it, but most depend to a greater or lesser extent on familiarity. Radical change is likely to make things unfamiliar and difficult in the short term.
