Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

Overall impressions

• Reactions are sharply mixed. Some find Liquid Glass fresh, intuitive, and a big improvement over flat design; others see it as overproduced eye candy that harms usability.
• Several commenters say screenshots don’t do it justice and that interactions feel better in use. Others, after a few days on beta, still dislike it and want a way to turn it off.

Readability, interaction, and “content first”

• Multiple users report reduced readability, especially with mid-tone photo backgrounds: icons and labels can be hard to pick out, and icon colors shifting with background content feels distracting.
• Supporters like that controls visually recede, making content feel more central, and say they can find controls more easily despite their subtler appearance.
• Critics argue that essential controls shouldn’t be visually quiet or context-tinted; they want clear, persistent affordances with strong contrast and color on buttons.

Performance, thermals, and battery

• Many report early betas running warm, with choppy scrolling and worse battery life on recent iPhones; some note this is typical of first developer betas due to indexing and diagnostics.
• A few say performance normalized after a day or two, while others feel their previously “buttery” devices are just slower.

Accessibility and cognitive load

• Strong concern that dynamic glass, refraction, and color adaptation increase visual noise, especially for people with low vision, older users, or neurodivergent users who struggle with busy backgrounds.
• Some find the UI “dancing” and harder to parse; others highlight that accessibility settings can reduce transparency, blur, motion, and increase contrast, but worry many users will never discover those options.

Design philosophy, history, and comparisons

• Frequent comparisons to Windows Vista/7 Aero, iOS 7’s first flat redesign, Material Design, and older skeuomorphic Apple UIs.
• Some see this as a thoughtful, physics-inspired evolution toward 3D/AR interfaces; others call it a regressive return to cheesy glass, driven by fashion and GPU horsepower rather than UX needs.
• Debate over whether leveraging intuitive depth cues (light-from-above, gradients) is better than refraction effects that people don’t naturally interpret.

AR / cross-device rationale

• Several speculate Liquid Glass is primarily about unifying design across iOS, macOS, visionOS, and future AR glasses; structured transparent layers are seen as more natural in XR.
• Others argue what works in an AR HUD doesn’t automatically translate to flat desktop or TV interfaces, where transparency can obstruct instead of help.

Implementation quality and guidelines

• Many note that parts of the current betas (e.g., Control Center, lock screen, some macOS apps) visibly violate the very guidelines shown in the video (e.g., “no glass on glass”), leading to clutter and legibility problems.
• Some expect Apple to iterate toward something closer to the demo’s best-case examples; others think shipping this rough a first cut reflects a lowered internal quality bar.

Developer and ecosystem impact

• Questions about how third‑party and cross‑platform UI toolkits (e.g., Qt) will look inside the new system, and whether they’ll feel even more “off” compared to native glass.
• Concern that the richer visual system gives app developers many ways to get it wrong, potentially leading to a few years of messy, over-glassy third-party UIs unless the defaults are very safe.

Apple culture, process, and presentation

• Several comments frame Liquid Glass as a symptom of Apple prioritizing style, brand distinctiveness, and department “mission” over simplicity and clarity.
• Some blame long-term leadership and loss of earlier design voices; others push back, noting the same senior people are still in charge and this is a deliberate top‑down choice.
• The video’s heavily produced tone, buzzword-heavy script, and synchronized gestures strike many as uncanny and overly “marketing,” undermining trust in the rationale.