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Apple's Liquid Glass design system, which it introduced at WWDC 2025, is becoming mandatory for all iOS apps starting with iOS 27 in September 2026. Compatibility modes are going away in Xcode 27. And on June 8, just eight days from now, WWDC 2026 kicks off with what's shaping up to be the biggest design shift since iOS 7 flattened everything in 2013. On top of that, Apple is completely rebuilding Siri as an AI agent, backed by Google Gemini, with a new dedicated app and a Dynamic Island interface. As a product designer who has shipped products on Apple platforms, this is the moment where a lot of teams either adapt well or fall behind badly. Here's what I think every designer needs to understand right now, before the keynote.
Let me start with the Liquid Glass situation, because I've been watching the adoption story for the past year and it's more complicated than most people realize. Apple introduced the translucent, physics-based design language with iOS 26 at WWDC 2025. It was a dramatic visual departure. Fluid surfaces, refracting glass-like elements on tab bars and controls, a more immersive material that reflects surrounding content. The reviews from users were mixed. The reviews from developers were, honestly, pretty frustrated.
"Six months after launch, the new design language remains divisive and controversial, with developers unhappy about the decreased readability in iOS 26 and the fact that it required visual changes to already working apps. Apple is making Liquid Glass design mandatory in iOS 27, with requirements for developers to stop using compatibility modes in Xcode 27."
— AppleInsider, March 2026
The readability criticism is legitimate. Glass-on-glass layering creates visual noise when app content sits under translucent surfaces. Navigation bars that refract background content look stunning in Apple's marketing materials and genuinely confusing in apps with dense information. The apps that pulled it off well in iOS 26 were the ones where designers went back to fundamentals, reconsidered every color, every contrast ratio, and every information hierarchy decision they had made before glass was a factor. The apps that just applied the APIs and shipped it look rough. And now, there is no hiding behind compatibility mode in iOS 27. Every team has to deal with this.
Apple's refining the system for iOS 27. Reports from 9to5Mac in May indicate key design changes are coming to streamline how Liquid Glass works across surfaces. The search tab is being merged with other tabs in core Apple apps like Podcasts, TV, Music, and Health. The camera interface is getting fully customizable controls. Most importantly for accessibility, Apple is reportedly adding a transparency and contrast slider that gives users control over how much glass effect they experience. That's a signal that even Apple knows the current implementation has edge cases that aren't working for everyone.
What Liquid Glass Actually Demands From Your Design System
Here's the thing that teams are not thinking about clearly enough. Liquid Glass is not a visual style you can bolt onto an existing design system. It's a material that interacts with everything behind it. That means your color system, your elevation model, and your spacing decisions all need to account for how content looks when a glass surface is floating in front of it. The static components you built for iOS 15 or 16 were designed in a world where backgrounds were opaque. That world is over.
I've been through platform design transitions before, and the teams that handle them well do a few things consistently. They audit every screen in their app and identify which elements are now sitting near glass surfaces. They test contrast at every realistic background state, not just the light and dark mode defaults. They stop using the pre-glass component defaults and start rebuilding from the material system up. The shortcut of "it looks fine in our screenshots" is exactly what causes your app to look broken on real devices with real wallpapers and real content behind the glass.
via GIPHY
The Siri Redesign Is a Much Bigger Deal Than People Realize
Liquid Glass is the visible story. But the Siri redesign might be the more significant one for product designers in the long run. Bloomberg and MacRumors both reported extensively on this in May: Apple is rebuilding Siri from the ground up around a new model that integrates Google Gemini technology, AI-powered web search, deeper access to personal data, and a dedicated Siri app that puts the assistant front and center on the iPhone for the first time.
The UX model is completely different from the current Siri experience. The redesigned Siri lives in the Dynamic Island as an always-on agent. You access it by swiping down from the top center of the screen. Results appear as rich text cards that pop out of the Dynamic Island, not as a full-screen interrupt the way Siri currently works. And below that, there's a dedicated Siri app with a chat history, a conversation interface, and support for third-party AI agents including Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude.
That last part. Apple is surfacing other AI agents directly in the Siri interface. That's a significant bet that Apple is making on orchestration rather than a closed AI moat. And it has real implications for product designers building AI features into iOS apps.
Five Things Product Designers Should Do Before June 8
WWDC 2026 is eight days away. The betas will drop the day of the keynote. Here's what I'd be doing right now:
- Audit your icon first. As AppleInsider noted, outdated flat icons instantly signal that an app hasn't been updated for iOS 26 or 27. Icons are the first thing users see. If yours still looks pre-Liquid Glass in the App Store, it's costing you downloads before anyone opens the app.
- Map every glass surface in your current app. Every tab bar, every navigation bar, every modal sheet. List what content appears behind each one at the most extreme states. That's your risk surface for contrast failures.
- Design for the transparency slider. When iOS 27 ships a control that lets users reduce glass effects, your app should not break or look inconsistent at reduced glass. Build your UI so it degrades gracefully when the glass material is softened.
- Think about your Siri integration strategy. With the new dedicated Siri app supporting third-party AI agents, there's a real opportunity to surface your product's AI capabilities in a way that was not possible before. App Intents and Spotlight indexing are more important in iOS 27 than they've ever been.
- Download the WWDC 2026 beta the day it drops. Run your whole app through it. Don't wait for the release candidate. The teams that identify their Liquid Glass breaks in June have three months to fix them before the September public release. The teams that wait until August have three weeks.
The Design Opportunity Nobody Is Talking About
Most of the coverage around Liquid Glass has framed it as a compliance problem for developers. And that's fair. It is a real amount of work. But there's an opportunity here that I think is being missed. The Liquid Glass material, done well, is genuinely beautiful. The apps in Apple's developer gallery that embraced it fully look different from every other platform. When the material is used correctly, with well-chosen content behind it and a color system that was designed with glass as the baseline, not bolted on afterward, it creates an experience that feels alive in a way flat UI never did.
Apple introduced Liquid Glass right as AI-driven personalization is pushing interfaces to be more dynamic, more contextual, more responsive to the specific user and moment. A translucent material that reflects whatever is behind it is, philosophically, the right design direction for a platform that now has an always-on AI agent living in the Dynamic Island. The glass shows you the world behind it. The AI knows what's behind it. The two ideas are actually coherent together.
The design teams that see this moment as a chance to rebuild their iOS app with the new system as the baseline, rather than as a patch to apply to the old system, are the ones who will come out of iOS 27 with something that stands out. The ones who treat it as a compliance checkbox will ship something that works but doesn't sing.
I'll be publishing my full WWDC 2026 design breakdown the week of June 8, once the beta is in my hands and I've had time to actually test what the keynote reveals. Subscribe or bookmark reloadux.com/blog if you want that piece. I also have some earlier writing on AI-native design systems over at my Medium that's relevant context for where all of this is heading.
Are you building an iOS app right now? Have you already tackled the Liquid Glass transition or are you still in the wait-and-see camp? I'd genuinely like to know where teams are with this, because the anecdotes from my own network are all over the place. Drop it in the comments.
Sources: 9to5Mac: "iOS 27 to make key design changes to streamline Liquid Glass" (May 12 2026), MacRumors: "iOS 27 Getting Major Siri Redesign With Chat Interface and Dedicated App" (May 12 2026), Bloomberg: "Apple to Overhaul iOS 27 Siri, AI Features" (May 28 2026), AppleInsider: "Stop holding out hope, Liquid Glass will be mandatory in iOS 27" (March 26 2026), Apple Developer: WWDC26 (developer.apple.com/wwdc26), Gadget Hacks: "Liquid Glass Developer Gallery Explained" (2026), AppleInsider: "iOS 26 review one year later" (May 8 2026), Engadget: "Apple's Siri overhaul for iOS 27" (2026)