Apple’s new Liquid Glass UI design unveiled at WWDC 2025 is nothing new - I can see right through it

The old saying, “if you wait long enough, everything comes back into style eventually,” is usually attributed to the fashion industry, but it seems to apply to pretty much anything, especially mobile phone interface design.

So, while my younger colleagues are getting all hot and bothered about Apple’s new Liquid Glass design for its operating systems, like iOS, macOS, iPadOS, and tvOS, forgive me if I can’t help but be a little less enthusiastic, because I’ve seen all this before.

The crux of the new Liquid Glass design is that the “material” (an odd choice of words from Apple to describe something that’s purely digital) used for the background to menus, and out of which icons are “crafted”, behaves like glass would in the real world, if it also flowed like a liquid.

That obviously means you can see through it, which is what people are ...