Apple has previewed a beautiful new software design that makes apps and system experiences more expressive and delightful while being instantly familiar. It’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. 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.
Liquid Glass: A New and Expressive Material
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 colour 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 Centre, and more.
Updated App Designs
Driven by the goal of bringing greater focus to content that’s instantly familiar, Apple’s design team considered every aspect of Apple’s platforms to identify improvements that could be made across the board.
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.
Read more: https://www.apple.com/
