Apple’s ‘Liquid Glass’ won’t make the sky fall

I was on the ground yesterday at Apple Park covering this year’s WWDC keynote. The star of the show was Apple’s introduction of its all-new Liquid Glass design language. The company has a great session on Liquid Glass in the Developer app. I highly suggest watching it (and other sessions) on a big screen television through an Apple TV 4K; I did so last night on my 77-inch LG C3 OLED last night and it was a blast, if terminally nerdy.

I’m still trying to devise a plan of action for testing iOS 26, et al, throughout the summer. In full transparency, I’m one of those rare birds in tech media circles who neither run the developer betas nor the public betas of the new operating systems. I’m a terrible tester, although I usually do jump to the iOS public beta on my iPhone late in the summer closer to its official release come September. With the advent of Liquid Glass, however, I feel it’s in my best journalistic interest to prioritize testing at least one beta. As I told some Apple employees following the presentation, Liquid Glass truly is a de-facto accessibility feature unto itself. While it’s undoubtedly true Apple’s stated goals of creating cohesiveness and harmony are important to accessibility, the reality is what really matters is how Liquid Glass performs in a practical sense. Practicality entails legibility, contrast, and motion. For people with low vision—and people with 20/20 vision, for that matter—the choices Apple has made with Liquid Glass, the proverbial proof in the pudding lies in usability. All the flowery, romanticized marketing bluster regarding harmony means zippo if Liquid Glass isn’t readable. Personally, I find Liquid Glass to look damn cool and quite beautiful; nonetheless, I’m predisposed to be skeptical as a lifelong disabled person and thus was alarmed by some of what I saw in Apple’s marketing video. Fortunately, my fears were quickly allayed by high confidence in Apple’s track record in accessibility and confirmation that changes will be coming.

I connected with Sarah Herrlinger, Apple’s senior director of global accessibility policy and initiatives, for a few minutes after the keynote ended. It was decidedly not an official, on the record interview, but I can confidently report Herrlinger told me her teams worked in tandem with the design team to build Liquid Glass and make it as accessible as possible. To that end, she noted Liquid Glass works with features such as Reduce Transparency, amongst others, in increasing legibility. I’m sure I’ll have more to report in the coming weeks and months. For now, I’m willing to take Herrlinger at her word, along with the reporter’s grain of salt, that Liquid Glass is accessible unto itself.

As I write this, it’s been roughly 24 hours since Apple introduced Liquid Glass. In that time, the timelines across my myriad social media services have been insufferable. There are so many insipidly bad takes on Liquid Glass from wannabe Apple designers who are posting hot takes to feed into social media’s worst impulses. There’s absolutely room for constructive criticism—👋🏼, journalist here—but there’s also room for common sense. Apple released the first beta of its new platforms yesterday. There is a whole summer yet for the company to tweak and refine Liquid Glass. Of course Apple engineers must reach a degree of “doneness” when readying the beta builds, but they’re betas for a reason: they’re essentially unfinished. The software will evolve before being publicly released later this year. Back in 2013, iOS 7 similarly overshot on the usability vector before dialing back to the mean before its final release alongside the iPhone 5C and 5S in the fall. There’s no doubt in my mind iOS 26 and Liquid Glass will walk the very same path in 2025, so crying Chicken Little seems utterly pointless.

Finally, a cool little personal postscript to Monday’s announcement. My first WWDC was in 2013, the year iOS was first redesigned. 13 years later, I was literally at Apple Park watching iOS 26 getting its Liquid Glass redesign. As a friend said to me after the presentation ended, 13 plus 13 equals 26. All told, I think it’s nice symmetry all around.