Inside the Launch of Liquid Glass, Apple’s Biggest iOS Update in Over a Decade

Smiling. Everyone is smiling. There is not a single frown detected. Every employee chirps HELLO and WELCOME with the most ecstatic grins; they clap in sync with Ed Sheeran’s “Azizam” as it cannonballs out of massive speakers. The vibe: This Is The Best Day Ever.

We’re not at Disneyland or Jonestown. This is the 2025 edition of WWDC, or the Worldwide Developers Conference, an annual event where Apple unveils its flashiest new software. In an outdoor pavilion, thousands of wooden chairs quickly fill up with TikTokers, designers, and Apple employees—including two of the guys most responsible for Apple’s new update, Alan Dye and Craig Federighi, who I’ll meet later for an exclusive conversation about the day’s biggest announcement. This tech spectacle is so hotly anticipated that the many programmers who came from around the world had to submit to a lottery to gain entrance. It feels like the first day of college: a tangle of first-timers and veterans milling about in organized anarchy, a hundred accents blending together under the beating California heat.

Over the next couple of hours, Apple will announce a whole suite of new features that you’ve now heard about, including the introduction of iOS 26, the most sweeping update to its operating system (iOS) in over a decade, going back to iOS 7 in 2013. (The changes include the naming convention; the number now represents the year of release.) The nervous excitement feels particularly charged today, perhaps because of the existential moment we’re in. Apple, one of the richest companies in the world, has long dominated the world of hardware. But the rise of artificial intelligence has set the ground quaking under even the most established tech players; the pursuit of AI is happening on a much more level field that includes frenetic startups with soaring valuations. Apple, of course, has poured its formidable resources into what the company calls Apple Intelligence, which rolled out last year. Many observers were expecting that the company would announce a new, AI-powered leap forward for Siri at WWDC, and not a sweeping software redesign. When Apple punted on AI and instead announced Liquid Glass—the new translucent software design that will be used across iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV—the scrutiny of the new design was particularly feverish.

Imagine the glacial glaze of a future-bass Flume song but in the form of a digital design system that manipulates the opacity so buttons, menus, toolbars and more refract and reflect the color of the pages and platforms beneath them, as if the user is gazing into a crystalline pond of Content. Across demos and multiple interviews, Apple staffers kept urging me to touch and play with it, to really feel the satisfying plop and curl of the scrollers when you tap. As Dye would later tell me, perhaps alluding to the people online who were complaining about screenshots of the new design without having tried it, “It’s one of those projects where you really have to experience it to get it.”