// WIRED US/UK — MODA & SOCIETÀ
Liquid Glass Finally Makes Sense on the iPhone Duo
Apple rarely admits a mistake. But when it unveiled new versions of its operating systems this summer, it came close.
“With all major design updates, there’s a natural process where we take a bold leap forward, and then we continue to iterate,” said Apple's human interface designer, Shubham Kedia, during a predictably sleek keynote video. “Our team really appreciates your feedback, and we considered it deeply as we refined the new design.”
Not quite “Sorry, everyone, we messed up,” but for Apple, practically an apology tour. The subject was Liquid Glass, Apple’s most divisive interface design since at least iOS 7. Apple's Vision Pro mixed-reality headset (which itself flopped) inspired the translucent design language, and the company brought it to millions of other Apple devices.
The result was a mess—at odds with Steve Jobs’ famous line, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Liquid Glass started obsessed with gloss and effects, despite promises it would bring your content to the foreground. Yet Apple’s own press release showed interfaces with illegible text. Worse, users found constant reflections and flickering color shifts distracting, and a lack of clarity across devices hurt accessibility.
But iOS 27, alongside updates to Apple's other software platforms, signaled a shift in priorities after Kedia’s mea culpa. Kedia spoke of reincorporating design cornerstones in what was, if not quite a U-turn, then at least a rediscovery of a core principle: how it works. Instantly, interface elements across Apple devices gained greater clarity and structure, making it easier to tell apps' components from content. The most obvious change, though, was a slider.
Apple said it tuned Liquid Glass to diffuse complex content more effectively, keeping elements legible when above imagery and text. But it also acknowledged that not everyone wants the same thing—some users might prefer a more tinted look, and others “would like Liquid Glass to be even more clear.” You can now decide for yourself with the Liquid Design slider in Settings. For a company known for being opinionated, such bet-hedging was surprising but not unwelcome. Choice isn’t a bad thing, and now users had more of it.
“I immediately pushed that slider all the way to the most tinted setting, and pretty much all the legibility issues vanished,” Ben Rice McCarthy, an indie developer behind popular apps like Obscura and Indigo, tells WIRED. McCarthy has long criticized Liquid Glass. Now? Not so much.
“Liquid Glass introduced a lot of issues without adequate solutions, but this year’s operating systems solved or improved a lot of them,” McCarthy says. “There’s the adaptiveness of the interface. Buttons can grow into menus. Controls merge and divide like cells as you transition between views. Toolbars can expand and contract smoothly as the view changes size.”
Flexibility matters when resizing windows across any device. But while announcing its updates, Apple also dropped major hints that all but confirmed new hardware—it showed iPhone apps running on an iPad or a Mac could resize to a suspiciously specific shape that matched the rumored inner display dimensions of Apple’s upcoming folding phone.
When Apple showed off the iPhone Duo, everything clicked. Its passport-shaped display bucks the trend of iPhones and their rivals growing taller over the years. The Duo is wider and almost squat, and when opened, it naturally defaults to landscape, echoing the iPad Mini display.