Apple has unveiled a new software design that brings greater expressiveness and clarity across all platforms. The design is crafted with a new translucent material called Liquid Glass, which reflects and refracts its surroundings to bring greater focus to content and add vibrancy across controls, navigation, icons, widgets, and more.
Liquid Glass draws inspiration from the depth and dimension of visionOS and leverages Apple’s latest hardware, silicon, and graphics technologies. It responds to motion and lighting, adapting in real-time and giving users clearer context and focus while using apps and navigating the system. Liquid Glass is used throughout the interface, including buttons, switches, sliders, text, media controls, tab bars, side bars, and in system experiences like the Lock Screen, Home Screen, Control Center, and more.
With the new design, controls, toolbars, and navigation within apps now fit the rounded corners of Apple’s hardware perfectly, improving harmony across hardware, software, and content. In iOS 26, tab bars and sidebars shrink while scrolling to prioritize content and expand when needed. In iPadOS and macOS, sidebars now refract the background content while reflecting content around them.
The new design is also applied to core apps such as FaceTime, Camera, Photos, Safari, Apple Music, Apple News, and Apple Podcasts. It extends across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. In the Lock Screen, the time is crafted out of Liquid Glass and adapts to fit behind subjects. The Home Screen and desktop are built from layers of Liquid Glass, offering vibrant light, dark, tinted, and clear styles with expanded personalization options for the icons, widgets, and Dock.
The new design debuts across iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 261, delivering a unified yet distinctly tailored experience on each device. For more details, visit Apple’s website.
