On June 9, 2025, Apple used its WWDC keynote to announce its broadest software design update in over a decade: Liquid Glass, a new translucent interface material spanning iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS. It was the first time since the flat-design shift of iOS 7 that Apple redrew the look of every operating system at once.
The same keynote reset version numbering across the board. The updates shipping this fall are named iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26, and visionOS 26 — a year-based scheme that replaces the old per-platform counters. For developers, the fall release doubled as a concentrated UI migration project.
One overhaul across six platforms
Alan Dye, Apple’s vice president of Human Interface Design, called it “our broadest software design update ever” in the company’s announcement, adding that it “lays the foundation for new experiences in the future” and makes “even the simplest of interactions more fun and magical.” Liquid Glass borrows depth and dimensionality from visionOS: the material is translucent, reflects and refracts its surroundings, produces specular highlights through real-time rendering, and reacts dynamically to movement. Its color is informed by the content behind it and adapts intelligently between light and dark environments. Apple explicitly credited close collaboration between design and engineering for making the glass-like optical qualities perform in real time.
TechCrunch framed the refresh as the biggest visual update since iOS 7, and put it in design history: early skeuomorphism translated real-world objects into interface chrome, iOS 7 swung to simple shapes and clean lines, and years of accumulated visual debt got cleared in one stroke. The report also drew the strategic conclusion — an interface language proven on Vision Pro first, then carried back to phones and computers, is groundwork for device shapes beyond the ones we use today, glasses included.
From buttons to sidebars, the material reaches everything
Liquid Glass is not a wallpaper trick. Apple’s description starts at the smallest elements users touch every day — buttons, switches, sliders, text, and media controls — and extends to large navigation structures such as tab bars and sidebars. System experiences adopt it too: the Lock Screen, Home Screen, notifications, and Control Center. The material’s color reacts to the content behind it, which Apple says keeps the focus on content rather than chrome.
First-party apps updated in lockstep, including Mail, Safari, Apple TV, and Apple Music. The stated goal is harmony across platforms while keeping what makes each one distinct. For users, the practical effect is smaller jumps in navigation logic when moving from iPhone to Mac than at any point in the last decade.
Every OS jumps to 26
The naming changed just as much as the pixels. Per TechCrunch’s report, Apple stopped using per-platform counters like the expected “iOS 19” and switched to the year in the name, aligning every OS at 26 in one step. The piece argued the scheme makes version naming clearer and more consistent, and brings Apple in line with the year-based conventions Samsung and Microsoft already use, making it easier for people to identify the newest software.
macOS kept its place-name tradition with Tahoe. For enterprise and product teams, the practical benefit is cheaper communication: when everyone says “26,” they mean the same generation, and cross-device version comparison no longer requires a lookup table.
What it means for developers and product teams
On timing: a developer beta shipped the day of the keynote, the public beta opened a month later at beta.apple.com, and the free fall update reaches iPhone 11 and later for iOS 26. The work is more than a reskin — teams need to check how translucent materials behave over their brand colors, reconcile custom controls with the new navigation patterns, and decide whether cross-platform apps should adopt Apple’s new design language wholesale, all before the fall release.
Looking back from 2026, the keynote set the visual baseline for Apple’s platforms for years, and the year-based naming stuck as the new normal. The loudest same-week debate was not the material itself but how the translucency reads in practice: TechCrunch’s June 10 follow-up ran under the headline “Love it or hate it,” documenting just how mixed the reviews were — the kind of feedback loop product teams should watch closely after any redesign of this scale.
Sources
- Apple Newsroom: A new software design
- TechCrunch: Apple redesigns its operating systems with Liquid Glass
- TechCrunch: Apple introduces iOS 26 and macOS 26 in major OS rebrand
- TechCrunch: Liquid Glass is getting mixed reviews
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.