On the perceived shortcomings of Liquid Glass:

The general concerns that have been brought up around Liquid Glass, primarily legibility, are valid.

There are real tensions between the stated design objectives - separating the interface and the content layers, to elevate the latter - and the reality of Liquid Glass elements partially obscuring content and creating a swirl of distracting, constantly shifting colors and fuzzy shapes as you scroll and use your device. People have also noted that the Liquid Glass effects look quite sleek in Apple's marketing materials, but not as great in the real world, with less carefully curated wallpapers/content/etc.

That said, there are many people internally at Apple who deeply care about general usability, consistency, and accessibility, and are no doubt very vocal about these issues; so I fully expect things to course correct in the coming minor and major updates; just like we saw for iOS 7. If we don't see any improvements over time, that's where maybe we'll have to start worrying.

Taking a step back:

If you look at the history of software design, the tendency to sacrifice usability for visual appeal is a broader trend of the last decade or two.
The 80s and 90s were more dominated by usability and human factor concerns, as displays and input methods were very limited. There just aren't that many drastically different visual design directions you can take with a 512×342 monochrome screen.

But as capabilities grew, as computing devices went from niche to completely pervasive, and as the discipline broadened, general aesthetics and immediate visual appeal have taken precedence over past concerns like clear information hierarchy, high information density, feature discoverability, etc. both in the industry, and in the way new designers get trained and encouraged.

So at a higher level, I think for any designer that has been in the industry for a while, there is little new with the Liquid Glass story.
Drastic new designs are exciting to work on for designers, they catch people's attention, and immediately visible changes make for more striking marketing material than under the hood, nuanced technical changes.
At the same time, people don't like sudden change, particularly for something they use many hours every day, so any drastic redesign necessarily is going to trigger negative reactions. Understandably so when it seems to discard hard earned lessons.

What I'm really curious to see is the reaction of people who have never even heard of the term "Liquid Glass" as of right now, August 31st 2025, when they tap "Update Tonight" on their phones a couple weeks from now.



All that said, I think all of this is not the most interesting way to think of Liquid Glass in the long term.
Apple is a company that is always playing the long game. When thinking about any Apple announcement or decision, the question to ask isn't "What does this do for Apple today?" - but "What will this do for Apple over the next 5 years".

So in my view, two lenses through which to interpret Liquid Glass to better understand what Apple is doing here are:

I: Liquid Glass will make more sense in the context of hardware that is not released yet.

The rumors about near term future hardware encompass foldable devices, and bezel-less screens. Liquid Glass seems like it was designed with these technologies in mind, and it is very plausible that there are certain aspects of it that have been designed but not shown yet, and will only be revealed with this new hardware in the next couple years.

There’s also been speculation about Liquid Glass laying the groundwork for glasses products - this also makes sense, but that tech is further off so I think that if such products ever materialize, it will be with a version of Liquid Glass that looks quite evolved from this first release.

Liquid Glass runs on devices from the last 5 years, but it's really meant as a foundation for all the devices that will come out in the next 10 years. TBD on whether it's a worthy foundation or not.

II: Liquid Glass is meant to act as a "design moat" for Apple.

A big concern for Apple has always been to make sure that their platforms have unique, signature apps that aren't available at all on other platforms, keeping people in their ecosystem.

Rendering all those fancy distortions at up to 120 FPS is computationally expensive, and something that wouldn't work on the lower spec'd devices that are very common in the Android world.
Getting broad developer buy-in is tricky; Apple can leverage its technologies like SwiftUI to ensure that a Liquid Glass app will feel consistent on macOS/iPad/iOS/watchOS/tvOS; there is no real equivalent outside of the Apple garden.
And trying to emulate Liquid Glass without using Apple's implementation forces you to always be playing catch up, and things just won't feel quite right.

So to me the intent here is clear, and a continuation of Apple's general strategy: encourage developers to make Swift/SwiftUI apps that might look great and distinctive with Liquid Glass - but that will then be very tricky to recreate as Android/Windows/web apps.

I suspect this means that larger companies with their own design systems/agendas will mostly ignore it.



Final thoughts, from a practical "working designer" point of view:

If you go through Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, you will find that Liquid Glass is included in the "Materials" section, along with system materials that have been around for a decade+ such as blur & vibrancy. It makes much more sense to me to see Liquid Glass as a continuation of this existing repertoire than as a standalone, all encompassing feature (even though it's been framed this way by Apple for obvious marketing reasons).

The path I've been following as an app designer myself - and the advice I've been sharing with developer friends seeking guidance - is to take some distance from Apple's fairly prescriptive guidelines, and to treat Liquid Glass as a material to work with on its own merits.
There are Liquid Glass APIs that let you be pretty free form with your use of it, and I've been seeing designers share little experiments that use Liquid Glass yet are quite unlike what Apple has been showing. That's very exciting and I'm looking forward to seeing what people come up with.

After all, nothing in the App Review Guidelines says that you have to follow the Human Interface Guidelines to the letter. Plenty of apps use their own design vernacular (the Google ones being notorious for it).

In addition, if you want your app to run on iOS versions prior to iOS 26 (most developers typically want to support at least a few versions of iOS back), you'll have to maintain both a Liquid Glass design and a non Liquid Glass design, which is just extra overhead. So even developers committed to Apple's platforms & design guidelines might want to wait for iOS 27+ to incorporate Liquid Glass, as by that point they can get away with having iOS 26 as a minimum OS requirement.

The approach I am taking for the big coming Mark II update to my camera app, 65×24, is to use small touches of Liquid Glass where it makes sense, develop custom elements that complement it, but above all - preserve the uniqueness of the design. I'm fitting Liquid Glass to my design goals, rather than trying to shoehorn my designs within the still new and unproven Liquid Glass. My app will keep offering a "Classic" theme, as I care about supporting older devices (iOS 15+; older phone cameras have their own distinct rendition, and I care about my camera apps running on an iPhone 6S).