Rose-Gold-Tinted Liquid Glasses
This could’ve easily been 12 blog posts, but I opted for one that comprehensively captures how I feel about design on Apple platforms right now.
The Pendulum Swing
There was immediate criticism of iOS 7’s visual design. Concerns mounted pretty quickly about both style and accessibility. Some people remarked, “It’s only the beta,” implying significant change during the beta release phase was not just possible but probable. Yet, after it was released to the public largely the same as it was introduced, they said, “Give it time.”
The first few years of Apple’s new design language, most of the app icons I made and apps I designed were fairly simple and in line with expectations of the platform’s direction. Few colors, subtle or no gradients, definitely no edge effects or glossy treatments. It was really restrictive compared to the icons and UI that we used to make. You know, the style that made Apple the richest company in the world.
Years went by, and public tone shifted from defeat to hope. “The pendulum will swing back,” people said, wistfully. It became a common refrain in the last decade. People really expected Apple to shift back toward the kinds of things that made us all fall in love with their platforms and products to begin with.
And in spite of Apple’s renewed year-after-year commitment to this restrictive visual style, my clients increasingly asked for more illustrative, visually rich icons. That’s what they wanted. That’s what I wanted.
But the pendulum never swung back. Instead, we got Liquid Glass.
In a way, one could say Liquid Glass is like a new version of Aqua. It has reflective properties reminiscent of that. One could also say it’s an evolution of whatever iOS 7 was, leaning into the frosted panels and bright accent colors. But whatever Liquid Glass seems to be, it isn’t what many of us were hoping for.
Understanding It
I love new interpretations of older things. Sequels. Remakes. I will never tire of how new perspectives can create all-new versions of familiar things. Which is good, because it seems to be happening more and more, because kids who grew up on something are now the age they get to work on it. And I love that.
I also recognize that every creator’s mind changes through time and they will inevitably move on from one style in favor of the next.
But there’s one nagging feeling I have about reinterpreting beloved things, which is that before anyone attempts to do it, they must first seek to understand why it is beloved. It is only through understanding it that anyone can do the job well.
In order not to be mistaken, I do not think someone has to be a fan to make a good version of that thing. I also don’t think being a fan makes you the arbiter of whether it’s a good version of that thing or not. (This often is difficult for superfans to accept.)
And so it seems to me that the people who spearheaded both iOS 7 (2013) and iOS 26 (2025) either did not understand that the visually-rich style from 2001–2013 played such a significant role in Apple’s success or they simply did not care that it did.
Rest in Peace
I am exhausted from hearing that Steve Jobs has been apparently rolling in his grave at the sole discretion of whoever didn’t have their expectations of Apple met. Instead of remarking that he would be displeased, maybe it’s better to mark his death as a point in time when things would invariably shift.
Prior to Steve’s death, there was a not-so-secret effort internally to discover Apple’s DNA, which would presumably mitigate the eventual loss of its founder. The hope—I suspect—was that when Steve would die, Apple could sail off on a trajectory that continued the spirit not of Steve, but of the company he started with Woz.
Woz himself might argue that ship already had sailed. But for many of us, Mac OS X marked the moment Apple came into itself. The era of iMac, iPod, and Mac OS X solidified Apple as the industry leader, even if they were not yet in that position. These products and that aesthetic is what carried Apple to where it is now. It was the Apple of that era that built the iPhone.
I often think back to when Steve Jobs proudly stated, “iPhone runs OS X.” That says so much, even without his followup of everything they would get “for free” on iPhone just because they already built it for the Mac. iPhone would never have taken off had Mac OS X not paved the runway.
I am not quiet about how much I love my Mac. If I had to choose one device to keep, my Mac is it. That’s why it feels so odd for me to see macOS visually drift so far from where it started. It is macOS that is the backbone of the company. Despite years of all the wishing and promising that another device will one day capture the market computers have a hold on, my Mac is still the only device that can make something for all those other devices. In that alone, it feels like Mac should be the one leading everything else. Not following behind.
Yet, it’s the visual style from iOS and now visionOS that are dictating the visual style of macOS. It does not feel like a breath of fresh air as much as another nail in the coffin.
Rose Gold Retrospection
Am I selectively choosing the positive parts of the past, ignoring the negative parts? Am I just looking through Rose-Gold-tinted Liquid Glasses?
Yes, I am. I am looking selectively at the good things. That is a huge advantage of being able to create in the future we now live in: We get to observe and learn from the past, taking the best parts of it while discarding the rest. That is how technology is supposed to work.
Yet as years go by, we seem to lose more of OS X’s good things. Year after year, draggable borders and frames became thinner until they disappeared. Scrollbars vanished. Stronger contrast softened. We lost the visually rich design in applications and icons. And now, we’ve even lost the ability to make unique icon silhouettes that Apple once specifically retained when introducing the iOS 7 aesthetic to macOS because that was a distinct element of its heritage.
In fact, the rounded square icons that became the hallmark visual design characteristic of iPhone and iPhoneOS originated as a way to differentiate proper OS X apps from Dashboard widgets. And to be fair, at the time, a lot of iPhone apps felt like they were little widgets themselves. Even though the platform was forked from OS X, the little screen and low resolution encouraged smaller apps on iPhone.
Perceived Platform Stability
The form factor of iPhone really made the square app icons make sense. With touch input, maximizing the hit area for an app icon was a smart move. But it was smart in more ways than one.
By only requiring edge-to-edge square artwork, the glossy effect and rounded corners would be applied automatically. That makes it significantly easier for anyone to plop in anything they want as an app icon and have it look “okay” on device.
Decisions like this gave iPhoneOS some perceived platform stability. People interpreted that as having some shared understanding between apps and how they work.
But these platforms and their expectations have changed significantly since OS X and the original iPhoneOS. The smaller developer community once embraced Apple’s aesthetic and interface guidelines, sometimes leaning further in than Apple did, which generally worked pretty well.
However, iOS 7’s design took this to an extreme. By lowering the bar for visual design across the board, apps no longer had an obvious differentiator to mark the ones that didn’t behave as expected.
Simply put, when you saw an app that put a lot of effort into the visual design to look like an Apple app in the days of yore (including any novel material aesthetics), it generally signaled a desire to match the platform’s goals insofar as interaction as well. Custom (non-native) controls were once made with a level of care not just in their aesthetics, but also to replicate their functionality correctly.
Therefore, apps that did not have these visual design characteristics probably did not behave as you expected either.
However, the era we live in now has apps that don’t just outright reject the way a user expects to use an app (instead favoring their own method). That has always existed. But now they can more easily and effectively disguise themselves into looking almost identical to the “good” apps that do aim to meet user interaction expectations. All because the bar for matching the platform’s visual style is practically nonexistent.
The problem I see is that the people who really do care about their apps—you know, the Mac developers who are proud of being Mac only, not just Mac-first or Mac-compatible—they look no different from the big businesses who came into this market without a goal of meeting user expectations of native functionality.
It may seem like a good idea to automatically mask and apply a glass style to a stubborn third-party developer’s app icon to make it harmonize with the rest of the system. But now it’s just more difficult to see which apps don’t care about the platform they’re on.
Everyone can look decent without actually being decent. And that’s bad for perceived platform stability. That’s bad for users.
Take a Scroll With Me
Ye olde OS X that we fell in love with may very well be dead, but there’s so much we can all still learn from it.
Why did we move away from a system of explicit affordances that help users understand what will happen when they interact with a user interface? There are dozens of examples. But here’s one: Scrollbars.
Scrollbars clearly existed on Mac and iPod before Apple debuted the disappearing-reappearing trick on iPhone.
As iPhone was a low-resolution device at 320×480 with touch input, it could be understood why they went that route for that platform. All vertical views were likely truncated, so instead of always showing scrollbars, a decision was made to hide them. Users would later develop habits of flicking views up and down, and for those who remember the time well, you will also remember how odd it felt to use apps that did not feature vertical scrolling. Even if the view was short enough to not require it, it felt wrong without the rubber band effect.
Furthermore, fairly early on in the life of iPhone, designers would ensure the content view truncated at the bottom of the screen with half an item or half a line of text visible to let people know there was more “below the fold,” a term previously used for the front page of newspapers, and later, websites.
Apple may have started hiding scrollbars since the original iPhone, but when that decision came to the Mac, the same constraints did not apply. A Mac display is much larger and more dense than iPhone. A window can be any size, with any amount of content. Given this reality, an app designer cannot reliably control where a window truncates the content to communicate that there’s more there.
Scrollbars do not merely provide the ability to scroll. The first iPods did not have touch or mouse input, but a scrollbar still existed to indicate the current position and relative length of the view. The best analogy I can think of is how you can easily flip pages in a book, clearly see your position in it, and understand the overall length of the book based on the density of the current page.
The scrollbar simulates the depth of a book by giving you a visual, interactive control that simultaneously indicates the length and current position. If it is invisible, you get none of that.
While drafting this blog post in the Notes app, I have no idea how much text is above or below this very paragraph without a visible scrollbar. This issue has become so bad that some websites with articles will show a horizontal progress bar under its header that fills up as you scroll through an article.
Accessibility is for Everyone
Yes, I can optionally select a preference to show scrollbars always. But good usability is just good design. Good accessibility is just good design. That’s the whole job.
For how much Apple claims to care about accessibility, Apple fell flat with iOS 7. And everyone was right to criticize that then. What is remarkable is that in the 10 years that followed, there were still frosted buttons with unreadable low-contrast red text on them. No one should have to turn on an accessibility setting for a Delete button to be readable. That is the definition of a minimum viable product.
It’s one thing when it’s just one thing. But it’s been immeasurable over the years because of Apple’s influence and impact. This has infiltrated every rounded corner of the industry, because designers often use Apple as an example of doing it well. People offload their design responsibility when they can point to an example from Apple doing something a certain way.
And the thing that hurts so much is that Apple is good about accessibility and usability in so many ways. So how is it they exhibit such a large blind spot? We can all see it. For years, we have yearned for them to address these decade-old concerns.
But instead, they double-down with Liquid Glass. Issues that were once bad seem to now be reflected, refracted, and magnified.
Some details are genuinely really nice. Yet, some of the longest-standing issues remain unresolved. The design team that delivers the broadest change for a three-trillion-dollar company cannot be bothered to consider legibility as a primary function of the operating system?
User Experience
I suppose many people thought the purpose of user experience designers was to ensure this sort of thing would never happen. Yet here we are. And that frustrates me.
The experience of using an app was always the responsibility of everyone involved in creating it, especially the user interface designer. This wasn’t something that simply no one considered before UX designers came into the scene years after the development of the modern operating system.
I’d argue that while many experiences have improved, we have way more bad experiences in apps than ever before, dragging down the average considerably from where it used to be. Somehow, the introduction of UX designers into the field has marked an era with worse user experiences across every platform.
And yet here we are, signing ourselves up for another decade?
Asking a Lot
Apple has effectively infinite resources and operates on their own timeline, but everyone else does not have this kind of luxury. Springing big changes like this all at once forces so many independent developers, entire companies, and the industry as a whole to freeze their own development schedules to accommodate Apple’s design system.
It’s asking a lot. For almost nothing in return. I keep looking at all the changes Liquid Glass brings, and I cannot find one instance where it has markedly improved the experience in any way.
Everything that got rounder—except for the things that didn’t—why? Everything that got inset that wasn’t before—why? Everything that is now blurry—why? I don’t think it’s a secret that the content area of some apps decreased. The margins and padding increased—except where it didn’t.
In some ways, there’s almost more UI variance than there was before, which doesn’t make any sense. But in other ways, everything feels far more restrictive than it once was. Which I admit, also doesn’t make much sense. App icons weren’t just more expressive on OS X, they could be a much wider-range of materials than merely glass.
I know I can still draw anything I want within that square, and that the glass appearance on objects inside of it is purely optional. But the edge of every icon now has a glass appearance I can’t do anything about. If my icon is paper, wood, metal, or—god forbid—leather? It has a glass specular highlight. On macOS, it’s currently locked at a 45° angle. Which is not something I agreed to.
Swinging for the fences like this comes with substantial risk. Especially for matured products like macOS. This product is almost 25 years old, and I would hope there would be a little more caution when expecting effort from and forcing changes upon a developer community you’ve largely lost your goodwill with. These kinds of decisions have long-lasting effects and I’m sure many developers would’ve appreciated their time being considered before asking them to incorporate a design they did not sign up for.
Actually, Who Is in Charge Now? And Why?
Back in the day, Steve Jobs had an incredible vision for the future that mostly materialized. And as it was being constructed, everyone who went to work at Apple deferred to that vision.
That’s what happened to me. I knew I would give up a certain amount of control, but I trusted that vision. More than that, the fact that everyone else would do the same spoke volumes, and the result was a technological renaissance that has already passed.
I think many of us were pretty okay with Steve in charge.
But now when I see Liquid Glass, part of it feels like it just resets us back to where we were ten years ago. The pendulum didn’t swing back. Giving it time didn’t make it better. After ten years, it all feels like this is someone who just dug their heels in.
There’s a whole design team at Apple which I can only guess is a great mix of people, with varying levels of platform experience. I must assume some people know the platform very well, while others are undoubtedly fairly new to it, which is great. I can only hope that everyone on that team attempts to understand the platform’s history before they make drastic changes to it.
But what I am now absolutely sure of is that if the last decade represents Alan Dye’s vision for this platform, then I disagree with it. I don’t trust this direction. I didn’t need the last ten years to see that, but I’m disappointed that in ten years he still doesn’t see it.
I don’t understand why this guy’s in charge of the Human Interface group at Apple. It makes no sense to me.
The Next Ten Years
I know this largely doesn’t matter. And I know that I will continue to enjoy making icons even under arbitrary design constraints that I disagree with. I know Parakeet will continue to make the nicest icons on any platform well into the future.
I already made 15 different Liquid Glass versions of our clients’ icons as experiments. And I think they all work really well with just a touch of that glass effect. I don’t think everything needs it. Chromatic shadows are nice, and reusing layers for different color modes is very useful. I generally think icon production is a fair bit simpler for me, which I appreciate.
Looking back at the app icons we made over the last ten years for over a hundred clients at Parakeet, I can see exactly when things shifted. I think it will happen again, just faster this time.
So if I have any predictions, it’s that the adoption of Liquid Glass will be relatively quick, but developers and companies will probably deviate from it more quickly than they did with the previous style of iOS. A lot of these companies have matured in their own right, with their own established styles, having done their own research, with their own formed opinions. I doubt they will abandon that in any meaningful way in favor of an aesthetic that is more distinctly Apple’s.
Liquid Glass and the general implementation of it will not meaningfully change during the beta phase of the “26” release cycle. They’re not going to backtrack. And they’re not going to address long-standing concerns all of a sudden.
The general adoption of this may test the patience of an already weary community of developers who feel tired of toiling away on trivial changes such as this. As I said, I don’t think there is any meaningful benefit to it, and designers and developers may themselves feel that as they implement it.
Larger companies may take a hard look at whether it makes sense to have native apps at all versus just web apps. With so much eroded goodwill and Apple profiting immense amounts from third party developers, larger companies may reasonably question the benefit. I think they’d be right to do so. The web’s capabilities likely cover a lot of use cases that many apps need.
By the Way
Over the years, it feels harder and harder to relate with the general atmosphere Apple surrounds itself in. It wasn’t always this pristine. Everyone who presented wasn’t always so stylish. Not everyone used to talk like this. What is that, by the way? Why does everyone sound like a voice assistant? Or is it that voice assistants got their speaking style from Apple’s presentation style?
Apple didn’t used to craft a narrative around every decision in order to justify it. I feel like their presentations are burdened by reason and rationale, and their individual WWDC sessions feel increasingly pretentious like each of them are gods coming down to share their wisdom with us plebs.
It’d be nice if they were knocked off their pedestal, because I think they’re better when they’re trying to outdo someone else rather than themselves.
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Brasil