This is not a summary of the WWDC event: multiple journalists, bloggers, and YouTubers are much better than me at that.

This is not even a rant related to the Accessibility Nightmare that, for now ¹, Liquid Glass® is.

No, today I want to talk about design personality and where Apple decided to embed that personality.

Disclaimer: I know this is a work in progress (few things could be more WIP than a first Developer Beta), but I feel like what I’m trying to address goes beyond the status of this design, as it sits at its core and why it was created.

Until last year ², Apple devices’ personality was a unique mix between clean interface and gorgeous design details.

That contrast between colourful, highly detailed app icons ³ and minimalistic controls is (was?) something unique and based on a simple logic:

• Where content needed to shine, the UI would take a step back
• On the other hand, app icons displayed creativity and gave each device a unique look

This design was highly opinionated: users weren’t even able to re-organise icons freely in their home pages. That’s how much Apple cared about dictating their design choices.

Then, with WWDC24, we saw the first steps in a different direction. As I wrote last year:

Your iPhone can now look as bad as an Android device in the hands of a 15 year old guy with bad taste. Have fun!

Hidden in there, I’m afraid there’s a paradigmatic shift in how Apple thinks about design and content.

Before yesterday, Apple taught us that the interface doesn’t need to attract any unnecessary attention, and it seemed to follow these two evergreen principles from Dieter Rams:

Good design is unobtrusive: A well-designed product should not dominate or distract from its intended function. It should remain subtle and unobtrusive.

Good design is minimalistic: Less is more. Designs should strive for simplicity and avoid unnecessary complexity or decoration.

Looking at what was presented yesterday, instead, you can clearly see how the new UI often clashes with the content around (and below!) it.

So, what has changed? Why was it necessary to modify something that wasn’t broken?

I’m afraid the answer is, once again, that that’s what the market wants. How else can you show that you’re always growing, if you never change?

One sure way for Apple to distinguish itself from the competition is to leverage two things that it knows work: design skills and horse-power. Liquid Glass® merges the two together, making them impossible to separate (given the amount of resources needed to render all the fancy effects characteristic of the new glassy material) and, therefore, extremely difficult to replicate for the competition.

Apple is the only company that can afford to push such a hardware-demanding-design on all of its devices, without worrying about deprecating most of them.

The only way to make sure this new characteristic becomes an intrinsic personality of the design itself is, well… to apply it everywhere.

So here we are:

• Icons all look the same, as they disappear into the screen ⁴
• UI elements attract attention by displaying reflections, shadows, and blur effects

But I can’t shake the feeling that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what made their interfaces work so well in the first place: they managed to inject personality into their designs while still following solid UX principles where it mattered.

When your interface becomes the main character instead of supporting the user’s goals, you’ve broken the basic contract of good design. It feels like watching the company that taught us why restraint and user focus matter abandon those very principles.

Anyway, only time will tell and don’t get me wrong, there are quite a few things that I like about Liquid Glass®, and some animations/interactions are truly gorgeous.

As of now, I think the best way to see the direction Apple is headed in the short-term is to look at iPadOS. We’ll definitely see iPadOS and macOS merge more and more together as in the future.

wAnd if you consider that iPadOS started as a blown-out version of iOS, you might see how these could be the first step toward “one unique OS”.

Exciting!

P.S. If you want to play around with the new Liquid Glass® effect in Figma, Joey Banks has already recreated it.

Update 2025-06-11: Simon B. Støvring wrote a great explanation on “How To Bring Back Oddly Shaped App Icons in macOS 26 Tahoe”