Oh no. It looks like every button and menu is now a translucent layer, so that any noise from the background shows through and muddles the text. This seems like an accessibility nightmare.
Translucent layers generally make software unusable for me. In the video, I saw several instances that would be really really bad for me, where I’d be straining to understand the text. Looks really cool and futuristic though. Just like a movie. Big whoop.
I’m autistic, but this won’t only affect autistic people. A lot of people are going to have problems with this. I hope there’s a very prominent way to turn it off.
This is also likely a performance nightmare. Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices.
At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.
I agree, I think it extends to anybody who wants a calmer experience or has vision trouble or strain. I guess you can turn those options off but if the aesthetic appeal of the design is based on them then I assume we'll be getting a second-class version of it. I was already leaning towards switching to Linux for other reasons but I think this is the thing that finally pushes me there. I think optimizing for VisionOS is quite a bad idea from a UX POV, since they're two entirely different usecases. With augmented reality you need and want to see things in the background, whereas on other devices you don't. It's a fairly fundamental difference, and it's sad that they chose to go this way in my opinion.
It is, once again, designing interfaces based on "vibes" instead of science or principles or used feedback, optimising for looking good on screenshots and marketing materials and not for actual usability or user friendly was. With "vibes" here standing for whatever some SV asshole thinks it's cool and modern.
Alegria, flat design, pastel colors, or unholy amounts of whitespace. It's been the story of the last 15 years of UI design at least.
I’d bet there’s a toggle that dramatically increases opacity or eliminates transparency entirely while keeping the shading and gloss. If it exists I’m sure it’ll be popular.
Ever since we didn't use bolder text for bright text on dark backgrounds (dark mode) to keep with typographical principles, it looks like we're doubling down on the readability sins.
Surely anyone who's fiddled with the caption background opacity on their TV or video player knows this is a mess?
Would have been nice for someone to explain why we're getting Windows Aero[1] for main content and not just bezels.
I don't think this design language is mutually exclusive with readability, it actually looks really cool in many ways; I just can't fathom why the examples in the presentation seemed good enough to show.
I'm on the same boat. The specularity around edges don't match the refraction patterns and it throws me off every time. Somehow they thought this wouldn't affect readability of whatever button or panel it's applied to. They also use the specular bits as a border that's also so uneven depending on which direction light hits from. I noticed that some of the dark panels had almost no borders at the lower right corner.
Another bit I'd like to pick on is the speed at which transparent context bubbles spring out. Waiting for a panel to bounce back and forth so that you know where to put your finger next is so bad as a UX choice that I'm losing confidence in Apple.
From a visual point of view, there is now flat design mixed with this voluminous transparent design which is a weird combination of skeuomorphic and abstract designs in one. I really don't know what they were thinking.
macOS (I'm still on Sonoma tho): System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency. (I also recommend Reduce Motion, but YMMV - some animations are really helpful.)
I agree that these changes are distracting. I don’t want effects that change things as I move it. I want fewer distractions and don’t want things all over the place.
I liked webpages in the 1990s before the blink and marquee tags. I wasn’t excited by skeuomorphic design, but it was at least fun. Then there was flat blocky design which really sucked. Then that was undone by putting curves back in, and it was ok. Then people started adding a shit ton of empty space everywhere which was the first time when Millennials started f-ing up design. I still blame them today because they’re still the most opinionated and make terrible, TERRIBLE design decisions. I don’t think I’ll ever be happy again with interface design. It’s super f-d.
Accessibility aside, I don't see the appeal in this design. I find the current design quite pleasant and usable. Translucent 3D text sounds like teenage-me messing around in Photoshop in the early 2000s.
It’s going to be really interesting to see how this UI paradigm pans out. I think this captures a shift toward the extreme in responsive, fluid, convergent, whatever-you-want-to-call-it, design.
We’ve had books/scrolls for thousands of years, laid out in beautiful proportion, and now it has all melted in the oven!
There is, they outline it in this video. It looks like there are three ways to turn it off: high contrast, reduced motion, and frostier glass. So it looks like there's just a way to have a full basic icon with just the icon and the outline and a white background.
The future is translucent tablets ( smart glass pads ). It's not about what this UI is - it's about where it's going. This is the UI to bridge to the next hardware modality and begin to train people to prepare for (at first) HUDs everywhere, then smartglass and holoprojective displays.
Haven't been able to turn it off yet. It's so awful looking and distracting, even with "reduce transparency" and "reduce motion" enabled. I actually think these settings are making it stutter more. It's definitely slower than iOS 18.
Yep, nailed it. This is such regressive, ignorant junk. I mean... WTF? Welcome to the failed "transparent UI" fad of two decades ago. Apple tried to revive this trash a few years ago, but then seemed to back off (or maybe I just disabled it)... and now this?
Even for the current sorry state of Apple's design regime, this is disappointing. It's way beyond a squandering of desperately-needed-elsewhere engineering resources; it's a dated-looking degradation of usability (and potentially performance).
The "liquid glass" design changes shown by Apple look mostly like slight tinkering around the edges of how widgets look/feel. Way less of a design change than the move to flat design was.
I think it's going to look alright on iOS/iPadOS where apps are inherently full-screen and the "background images" are really "foreground content" where you do kind of want the controls to "recede".
On the other hand, I can already tell I'm going to despise this on macOS. I always work with windows maximized on my laptop, because I just want to concentrate on the document I'm editing, or code I'm writing, and have maximum space for that. And the past couple of versions of macOS by default make your menu bar a weird pale purple or pink or green that is hugely distracting because it's a blurred image of your desktop. Fortunately you can turn that off with the "Reduce Transparency" accessibility option, which I do.
But the idea that people using Macs want to always being seeing some colorful desktop image around the edges and at the top just seems bizarre to me. iPhones and iPads are more for consuming, so this makes more sense. And within apps on Macs this seems like it'll be fine. But I hate that it doesn't seem designed to let me "tune out" the desktop image while I use an app. It's taking existing translucency and just making it worse...
Someone put the Windows phone screen against this design, with opaque colorful blocks and clear text - and I was like "yep, I wish we go back to that. That is the future."
I'm sure they will continue to allow disabling transparency in accessibility settings, given that the current OS version has transparency throughout which can already be so disabled.
Yeah. On Windows some apps (the new Terminal) used to have the opacity set to 0.9 or something by default. First thing I did was set it to 1.0. Having the background bleed through is distracting for no real value.
I’m usually a big fan of Apple design and UX. Any change faces some initial resistance, but this is first real “Ugh, hard no” reaction I can recall after seeing some of those.
I installed it.
I really wanted to love it but it’s bad.
It’s very busy and the proportions in the Settings app are awful. It’s
on the “cozy” side of things (as opposed to “compact”). This means you see less options at one time on the screen and have to scroll more around the OS to get where you need to.
This new liquid glass will lead to liquid brain, because my brain will be melting trying to process all that visual mess daily.
Now of course, I'll have to experience this new design in practice to be sure, but judging from the screenshots it looks really hard on the eyes. Hopefully they'll allow the translucency to be customized.
Apple had a good run, I've genuinely enjoyed using their platforms daily, but I'm afraid they're dropping the ball now.
I guess on a long enough timeline, every company is bound to disappoint. It's hard to get it right, consistently.
As a user centered designer I naturally agree with most criticism shared here. Not the direction I would have wished for.
Trying to understand where this is coming from, I guess two sources:
1. It's a fashion update to give GenZ and younger something they haven't seen before. They are too young to remember Windows Vista, and are the most important future target group that spends 12+ hrs / day on their iPhone. Also it is an audience that heavily customizes their UI, and care more for visually communicating cool-ness, than to get work done with efficient UX. Similar to using rainmeter on a desktop PC. Unsurprising, this look a lot like a rainmeter skin.
2. This is a way to communicate unmatched quality. Similar to what AirBnB are doing. When everyone can use icon- and component libraries like material and shadcn to build UI:s, this is a visual language that communicates premium quality is through an interface and iconography that is different and too expensive for others to recreate. Many companies don't have the skill nor the time and money to do custom icons in 3D software, or create elaborate translucent effects. Let's see what multi-plattform apps will look like with this new UI, perhaps the goal is to make them stand out as "outdated"
I wonder how much of this transparent/glass design language is setting Apple up for AR interfaces where UI is overlaid on what you're looking at. Since you literally cannot have fully opaque elements with AR glasses this would be a smart way to ensure overall design is unified across platforms.
I don't post here often, but I hope someone at Apple is reading this as this is one of the worst designs I have seen from this company. Even in their own presentation they shows text hard to read, text on top of text. It's an accessibility and usability nightmare. I really don't want to give up iMessage but if what ships looks as bad as this I may jump ship.
I really dig apple's work. It's so refreshing to get a tech event in 2025 where design is a huge focus and not just duck taping another LLM to everything. Design is expensive and it's clear they've invested a massive amount of resources into liquid glass. It's not perfect, but I think they'll iron out some of the contrast bugs.
Agreed with other commenters that crappy electron apps will look increasingly out of place (... slack ...). Too bad LLM's coding efficiencies haven't been used to try to get us back to native UIs from electron yet. Companies would rather pocket the savings.
We have these brilliant high resolution displays, and these powerful, energy efficient GPUs that are always running and compositing frames like a game engine 120 times a second.
It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!
We can make things look convincingly like glass, or metal, or even materials that don't exist in reality. One reason for flat design is because it was the lowest common denominator and easy for devs to implement. If Apple makes it easy to implement this liquid glass stuff - Rectangle().background(.glass) or something - then it's going to be really successful.
This feels suspiciously like the goals of Microsoft's "Metro" design from the Windows 8 era. It will be interesting to see if Apple can do a better job of keeping the same design without damaging the desktop experience than Microsoft did.
I need to experience it more to have a clear opinion, but looking at those videos, these types of translucent UI layers with a magnifying glass effect feel so annoying when they move; it's distracting.
Knowing that people will be spending hours of the day with these animations, it could be overwhelming. I'm not someone who suffers from videos or video games with photosensitive content warnings, but for many people, this might feel similar, like a friend of mine who can’t play Quake 3 Arena because it gives him nausea. I’m sure there will be an option to turn it off.
I also suspect that Apple, for marketing reasons, felt the need to present something visibly new and eye-catching. They probably turned to flashy design resources meant to impress rather than serve real usability needs. It feels more like a UI concept made for a sci-fi movie than something designed with accessibility and productivity in mind.
When Apple introduced the whole skeuomorphic analogy, they did it because they needed to make a new way of interacting with touch-based apps feel tangible. That seemed totally fair.
When Apple brought a spatial analogy to the Vision Pro, it also felt fair they were thinking in terms of volume and dimensions, after all, they were teaching people how to interact with a new reality.
I can even understand Apple wanting to unify their design approaches, but bringing the “liquid glass” look to everything feels like a massive step backward. The interface looks messy, clunky.
It feels like Apple is entering a design hell, and I don’t know how they’ll get out of it.
As an indie app developer, this design update discourages me massively. The previous, minimal design gave the impression of being a platform, even though it was always mostly Apple stuff in Apple land.
The new design is so visually overwhelming that I think the only way for users to deal with it is to reduce complexity. I read a statistic that said the average user had 21 apps on their phone. I think that will reduce to 15 now, or less.
As for my app, this basically throws my whole design system out the window. I don't want to add glass to all my UI elements. Remember the visual noise that translucent window borders introduced in Vista? Why would I do that to my UI?
I like the fact that the new design introduces a sense of hierarchy, and that it has more animations. I also like that transition animations are now interruptible by default (watch the "What's new in UIKit" video for that). But that could've happened without the glass nonsense.
It was hard to feel excited in previous WWDCs, but I just took it as a sign of platform maturity. This year, on the other hand, is outright discouraging.
My 82 year old mother has enough trouble figuring out what is a button vs. what's not. She just taps everything on screen to find out. This is going to make it worse.
As someone who's getting old and whose eyesight is getting worse, this makes things strictly harder to read with lower contrast.
The 4th image on the page showing "All Of Me, Nao" is really hard for my eyes to read. I can't read "Nao" at all if I view that page on my iPhone. I can only read it on my Macbook Pro on a large external monitor.
I suppose there will be an accessibility setting to turn it off
Having used it very briefly, I think it’s a reasonable direction. Before you all jump to tell me why I’m wrong:
1. It makes depth and layering extremely clear.
2. It prioritizes focusing on the content.
These are good principles and I think they’ll last the distance. There are plenty of refinements needed, especially for accessibility. I suspect over the next few years we’ll see the direction toned back a little while still retaining the best parts.
Good Lord, this concept of „liquid glass“ is ugly. Not visibly distinct, looks blurry, not clear and sharp. And then they overlap with the content. I never liked the overlapping menus in Notability app either.
This is a flop like the flat keyboard design. Making worse by trying to make it better. Verschlimmbessert.
And this from a company with unlimited financial resources.
Every Electron app is going to feel incredibly out of place.
And for the few that aren’t okay with feeling out of place, the devs of those apps will now have to contend with shipping more macOS specific styles and workarounds.
I’m not looking to discuss Electron performance/etc so please ditch that discussion before it starts. I just find it interesting how comparatively tricky this particular UI styling might end up being for cross-platform developers.
I hate it. The distortions and refractions of every page element in the UI as you scroll (including moving in the opposite direction) would be maddening. I really hope there will be an option to turn this off, or at least tone it down.
[+] [-] dimal|9 months ago|reply
Translucent layers generally make software unusable for me. In the video, I saw several instances that would be really really bad for me, where I’d be straining to understand the text. Looks really cool and futuristic though. Just like a movie. Big whoop.
I’m autistic, but this won’t only affect autistic people. A lot of people are going to have problems with this. I hope there’s a very prominent way to turn it off.
[+] [-] austinl|9 months ago|reply
At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.
[+] [-] coastalpuma|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] highwaylights|9 months ago|reply
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Scree...
I don't know that a redesign was called for at all. I guess they needed to show something if Siri still isn't ready, but this is just not it.
I'd have personally hoped for them to beef up iCloud+ but I know it doesn't sell devices to the general user.
[+] [-] thenaturalist|9 months ago|reply
Why would you design readability and visibility to depend on chaotic, highly varied and probably sometimes bad underlying backgrounds?
I fail to see any systematic approach/ consistent design language at play here.
Let's hope this does not survive for long.
[+] [-] andrepd|9 months ago|reply
Alegria, flat design, pastel colors, or unholy amounts of whitespace. It's been the story of the last 15 years of UI design at least.
[+] [-] cosmic_cheese|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kmfrk|9 months ago|reply
Surely anyone who's fiddled with the caption background opacity on their TV or video player knows this is a mess?
Would have been nice for someone to explain why we're getting Windows Aero[1] for main content and not just bezels.
I don't think this design language is mutually exclusive with readability, it actually looks really cool in many ways; I just can't fathom why the examples in the presentation seemed good enough to show.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero
[+] [-] diabllicseagull|9 months ago|reply
Another bit I'd like to pick on is the speed at which transparent context bubbles spring out. Waiting for a panel to bounce back and forth so that you know where to put your finger next is so bad as a UX choice that I'm losing confidence in Apple.
From a visual point of view, there is now flat design mixed with this voluminous transparent design which is a weird combination of skeuomorphic and abstract designs in one. I really don't know what they were thinking.
[+] [-] rollcat|9 months ago|reply
iOS: Settings -> Accessibility -> Display & Text Size -> Reduce Transparency.
You're welcome.
[+] [-] thesuitonym|9 months ago|reply
That said, Windows 7 had an option to turn off all the translucency, so hopefully Apple ripped that idea, too.
[+] [-] SirMaster|9 months ago|reply
https://preview.redd.it/zzxh77iv906f1.png?width=2358&format=...
[+] [-] oftden|9 months ago|reply
I liked webpages in the 1990s before the blink and marquee tags. I wasn’t excited by skeuomorphic design, but it was at least fun. Then there was flat blocky design which really sucked. Then that was undone by putting curves back in, and it was ok. Then people started adding a shit ton of empty space everywhere which was the first time when Millennials started f-ing up design. I still blame them today because they’re still the most opinionated and make terrible, TERRIBLE design decisions. I don’t think I’ll ever be happy again with interface design. It’s super f-d.
[+] [-] sgarland|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] matja|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bandoti|9 months ago|reply
We’ve had books/scrolls for thousands of years, laid out in beautiful proportion, and now it has all melted in the oven!
[+] [-] ricardobeat|9 months ago|reply
This will be a massive improvement in usability over flat design, which made UIs only learnable by trial and error.
[+] [-] idk1|9 months ago|reply
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/219/
[+] [-] keepamovin|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] MetaMonk|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] CarVac|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] DidYaWipe|9 months ago|reply
Even for the current sorry state of Apple's design regime, this is disappointing. It's way beyond a squandering of desperately-needed-elsewhere engineering resources; it's a dated-looking degradation of usability (and potentially performance).
Depressing.
[+] [-] kelseydh|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|9 months ago|reply
On the other hand, I can already tell I'm going to despise this on macOS. I always work with windows maximized on my laptop, because I just want to concentrate on the document I'm editing, or code I'm writing, and have maximum space for that. And the past couple of versions of macOS by default make your menu bar a weird pale purple or pink or green that is hugely distracting because it's a blurred image of your desktop. Fortunately you can turn that off with the "Reduce Transparency" accessibility option, which I do.
But the idea that people using Macs want to always being seeing some colorful desktop image around the edges and at the top just seems bizarre to me. iPhones and iPads are more for consuming, so this makes more sense. And within apps on Macs this seems like it'll be fine. But I hate that it doesn't seem designed to let me "tune out" the desktop image while I use an app. It's taking existing translucency and just making it worse...
[+] [-] swah|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] theodric|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] moralestapia|9 months ago|reply
It looks so tacky.
[+] [-] vFunct|9 months ago|reply
I'm just wondering if Apple is going to make matching CSS updates in Safari so web app developers have matching visuals.
[+] [-] unknown|9 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] billti|9 months ago|reply
I’m usually a big fan of Apple design and UX. Any change faces some initial resistance, but this is first real “Ugh, hard no” reaction I can recall after seeing some of those.
[+] [-] snowwrestler|9 months ago|reply
Apple is pretty good on accessibility but sometimes it does involve changing some settings.
[+] [-] stalco|9 months ago|reply
As for accessibility… It’s hell. Have a look: https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC
[+] [-] plainOldText|9 months ago|reply
This new liquid glass will lead to liquid brain, because my brain will be melting trying to process all that visual mess daily.
Now of course, I'll have to experience this new design in practice to be sure, but judging from the screenshots it looks really hard on the eyes. Hopefully they'll allow the translucency to be customized.
Apple had a good run, I've genuinely enjoyed using their platforms daily, but I'm afraid they're dropping the ball now.
I guess on a long enough timeline, every company is bound to disappoint. It's hard to get it right, consistently.
[+] [-] designerarvid|9 months ago|reply
Trying to understand where this is coming from, I guess two sources:
1. It's a fashion update to give GenZ and younger something they haven't seen before. They are too young to remember Windows Vista, and are the most important future target group that spends 12+ hrs / day on their iPhone. Also it is an audience that heavily customizes their UI, and care more for visually communicating cool-ness, than to get work done with efficient UX. Similar to using rainmeter on a desktop PC. Unsurprising, this look a lot like a rainmeter skin.
2. This is a way to communicate unmatched quality. Similar to what AirBnB are doing. When everyone can use icon- and component libraries like material and shadcn to build UI:s, this is a visual language that communicates premium quality is through an interface and iconography that is different and too expensive for others to recreate. Many companies don't have the skill nor the time and money to do custom icons in 3D software, or create elaborate translucent effects. Let's see what multi-plattform apps will look like with this new UI, perhaps the goal is to make them stand out as "outdated"
[+] [-] nharada|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] stevenhubertron|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kylehotchkiss|9 months ago|reply
Agreed with other commenters that crappy electron apps will look increasingly out of place (... slack ...). Too bad LLM's coding efficiencies haven't been used to try to get us back to native UIs from electron yet. Companies would rather pocket the savings.
[+] [-] captainmuon|9 months ago|reply
It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!
We can make things look convincingly like glass, or metal, or even materials that don't exist in reality. One reason for flat design is because it was the lowest common denominator and easy for devs to implement. If Apple makes it easy to implement this liquid glass stuff - Rectangle().background(.glass) or something - then it's going to be really successful.
[+] [-] kej|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pentagrama|9 months ago|reply
Knowing that people will be spending hours of the day with these animations, it could be overwhelming. I'm not someone who suffers from videos or video games with photosensitive content warnings, but for many people, this might feel similar, like a friend of mine who can’t play Quake 3 Arena because it gives him nausea. I’m sure there will be an option to turn it off.
I also suspect that Apple, for marketing reasons, felt the need to present something visibly new and eye-catching. They probably turned to flashy design resources meant to impress rather than serve real usability needs. It feels more like a UI concept made for a sci-fi movie than something designed with accessibility and productivity in mind.
[+] [-] ricokatayama|9 months ago|reply
When Apple brought a spatial analogy to the Vision Pro, it also felt fair they were thinking in terms of volume and dimensions, after all, they were teaching people how to interact with a new reality.
I can even understand Apple wanting to unify their design approaches, but bringing the “liquid glass” look to everything feels like a massive step backward. The interface looks messy, clunky.
It feels like Apple is entering a design hell, and I don’t know how they’ll get out of it.
[+] [-] earthnail|9 months ago|reply
The new design is so visually overwhelming that I think the only way for users to deal with it is to reduce complexity. I read a statistic that said the average user had 21 apps on their phone. I think that will reduce to 15 now, or less.
As for my app, this basically throws my whole design system out the window. I don't want to add glass to all my UI elements. Remember the visual noise that translucent window borders introduced in Vista? Why would I do that to my UI?
I like the fact that the new design introduces a sense of hierarchy, and that it has more animations. I also like that transition animations are now interruptible by default (watch the "What's new in UIKit" video for that). But that could've happened without the glass nonsense.
It was hard to feel excited in previous WWDCs, but I just took it as a sign of platform maturity. This year, on the other hand, is outright discouraging.
[+] [-] gherkinnn|9 months ago|reply
This blog's prediction got remarkably close. I've been a sucker for glass UI since the first Longhorn (later Vista) screenshots.
[+] [-] appleiigs|9 months ago|reply
My 82 year old mother has enough trouble figuring out what is a button vs. what's not. She just taps everything on screen to find out. This is going to make it worse.
[+] [-] socalgal2|9 months ago|reply
The 4th image on the page showing "All Of Me, Nao" is really hard for my eyes to read. I can't read "Nao" at all if I view that page on my iPhone. I can only read it on my Macbook Pro on a large external monitor.
I suppose there will be an accessibility setting to turn it off
[+] [-] jordansmithnz|9 months ago|reply
1. It makes depth and layering extremely clear.
2. It prioritizes focusing on the content.
These are good principles and I think they’ll last the distance. There are plenty of refinements needed, especially for accessibility. I suspect over the next few years we’ll see the direction toned back a little while still retaining the best parts.
[+] [-] submeta|9 months ago|reply
This is a flop like the flat keyboard design. Making worse by trying to make it better. Verschlimmbessert.
And this from a company with unlimited financial resources.
[+] [-] Klonoar|9 months ago|reply
And for the few that aren’t okay with feeling out of place, the devs of those apps will now have to contend with shipping more macOS specific styles and workarounds.
I’m not looking to discuss Electron performance/etc so please ditch that discussion before it starts. I just find it interesting how comparatively tricky this particular UI styling might end up being for cross-platform developers.
[+] [-] Jordan-117|9 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Insanity|9 months ago|reply
But I’ll probably get used to it.