Apple launched a curated visual gallery on its developer website last November, showcasing third-party apps rebuilt around Liquid Glass, the translucent, layered design language that shipped with iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe, and watchOS 26. The Apple Liquid Glass developer gallery offers side-by-side iOS 18 versus iOS 26 comparisons for over a dozen apps, from CNN and American Airlines to indie titles like Tide Guide and GrowPal, according to 9to5Mac. It is a confident showcase. It is also a sign that Apple knows adoption isn’t happening on its own.
Liquid Glass represents the company’s most significant visual overhaul since iOS 7 abandoned skeuomorphism for flat design in 2013. Apple describes it as its “most extensive software design update” ever, one that fundamentally reshapes the relationship between navigation chrome and content, per WWDC 2025 Liquid Glass session materials. iOS 26 launched in September 2025, as 9to5Mac reported; the gallery arrived roughly five months later. The timing suggests Apple wasn’t satisfied with the pace or quality of adoption it was seeing organically.
This piece examines what that gallery reveals about where Liquid Glass adoption actually stands: what the featured apps have in common, what serious implementation requires, and why the transition remains contested nearly a year after launch.
What Apple’s gallery is really for
The gallery is not a passive resource. It is part of a coordinated support campaign Apple assembled over the fall: updated Human Interface Guidelines, new APIs and design resources, an in-person event in Cupertino on November 18, 2025, and dedicated showcase videos for individual apps like Tide Guide and Slack, as DesignZig reported at the time. Apple announced the gallery through its “Hello Developer” newsletter as a resource for teams “embracing native design, expressing their brand identities, and adopting the latest features.”
Apple’s WWDC design guidance describes Liquid Glass as defining “a new functional layer in the UI, floating above your content to bring structure and clarity, without ever stealing focus.” The instructions to developers are concrete: clean up over-customized bars, remove decorative backgrounds, and let hierarchy emerge from layout and grouping rather than visual decoration, per the WWDC 2025 design system session.
Adoption is also uneven by device and platform. On older hardware, apps maintain their existing appearance. On watchOS, the changes are minimal and apply automatically even without rebuilding against the latest SDK. The full Liquid Glass experience real-time lensing, dynamic tinting, interactive morphing is conditional on newer devices running iOS 26 or later, Apple’s documentation notes.
Put plainly, Apple is using the gallery to push developers toward a specific kind of redesign. It is showing what it expects and trying to close the gap between that expectation and what developers are actually shipping.
The scale of that gap matters. The gallery highlights just over a dozen apps out of an App Store with millions of titles. The featured examples are, by definition, outliers: teams with the resources, incentives, or ambition to rebuild around native controls from scratch. That makes them useful as models, but not as evidence that Liquid Glass adoption is broadly underway.
What Apple showcases in its Liquid Glass apps gallery
The gallery lists more than a dozen apps, including Crumbl, CNN, OmniFocus 4, Lowe’s, American Airlines, Sky Guide, and Lucid Motors, per 9to5Mac’s coverage. Four of them illustrate the specific architectural patterns Apple is rewarding.
The content-first pattern (CNN, Crumbl)
The through-line across featured apps is consistent: controls retreat, content expands. CNN redesigned its feed for edge-to-edge content that flows behind translucent chrome. Crumbl moved its pink branding out of the top toolbar and into the content layer, so product photography dominates rather than competing with the interface, DesignZig reported. This is precisely the pattern Apple’s documentation calls for: navigation elements floating above content rather than boxing it in.
The cross-platform indie (Tide Guide)
Tucker MacDonald, who has published Tide Guide since 2018, extended the redesign across iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS using Liquid Glass buttons, glass popovers, and refraction effects on a radar animation during onboarding. His framing of the design intent is worth quoting: “Liquid Glass is in service of creating new ways to interact with apps without getting in the way. It lets interfaces feel alive without being overweight, expressive and functional without being distracting,” per Apple’s showcase video for the app.
The serious productivity redesign (Slack)
Slack treated iOS 26 as the trigger for a full app overhaul. The team moved search permanently into the tab bar, rolled out a glass header and updated navigation in October, and continued incremental updates through December. Landscape support arrived as a downstream benefit of adopting native controls. The team described the redesign as a “big, bold bet,” staged carefully to avoid rewiring too much muscle memory at once, according to Apple’s Slack showcase video. Using native controls, they noted, also positions the app for future platform changes as the OS continues to evolve.
What Apple considers success
The common thread is not surface aesthetics. Featured apps moved navigation to the bottom, let content extend behind glass chrome, adopted standard system controls rather than custom-painted replacements, and treated Liquid Glass as a layout decision. Apps that kept heavy top toolbars, custom backgrounds, or decorative chrome do not appear in the gallery.
Apple chose apps that embody specific architectural choices. That tells developers what to aim for but it also frames a narrow, curated slice of the App Store as representative of the whole.
What the gallery doesn’t show: implementation friction and the consistency gap
The polished before-and-after frames conceal a more complicated reality.
Apple’s own showcase documentation flags Liquid Glass as GPU-intensive, advising developers to avoid applying the effect inside nested views, high-frequency scrollable areas, or lists, reserving it for static, top-level components like tab bars and toolbars. Applying glass to both a parent and child view creates visual redundancy. The Clear glass variant, which is permanently more transparent than the adaptive Regular mode, explicitly requires a dimming layer, or “legibility gets noticeably worse,” Apple warns in its Meet Liquid Glass session.
For developers outside Apple’s native stack, the transition is harder. Flutter’s design system libraries were being rearchitected at the time of iOS 26’s launch; teams working in the framework had to rely on community-built packages and navigate known layout edge cases, including issues with scroll view padding behavior, as Furkan Acar documented in February 2026.
The cross-platform consistency Apple promotes has visible gaps in practice. Independent observers counted at least four distinct border-radius sizes across macOS 26: Apple’s updated first-party apps, unupdated third-party apps, partially updated apps like Terminal, and browsers like Chrome each render window corners differently. The pattern is “almost random,” one observer noted in January 2026, with scrollbars sliding awkwardly under oversized corners.
Nielsen Norman Group found that iOS 26 departs from long-standing usability guidance in measurable ways: shrunken and crowded tab bars, collapsing navigation, touch targets that no longer meet the 0.4cm minimum spacing threshold, and translucent controls that blend into visually noisy backgrounds, per their October 2025 analysis.
These friction points performance constraints, framework gaps, legibility edge cases, inconsistent system rendering are exactly what the gallery’s polished showcase cannot represent. They are the adoption story that the featured apps, by definition, have already solved.
Why Apple needs the gallery: the usability debate behind the showcase
The gallery is Apple’s most direct response to a substantive and ongoing criticism of the design.
The Verge argued in September 2025 that Liquid Glass makes sense on Vision Pro where a layered, three-dimensional interface aligns with how users interact with a headset but breaks down on iPhone, where every experience is full-screen and translucent, color-shifting controls become visual clutter rather than seamless depth. The core objection: Apple is “trying to make a single interface metaphor work absolutely everywhere, and it just doesn’t.”
Apple’s own guidance quietly acknowledges the same risks. The company built in opt-out accessibility settings Reduced Transparency, Increased Contrast, Reduced Motion and introduced a “Tinted” glass variant after the original Clear option proved frequently illegible in practice, per the Meet Liquid Glass session and independent observers. The addition of Tinted looks like a response to legibility problems Apple had already begun to acknowledge, not an anticipated edge case.
The gallery’s selection criteria implicitly respond to these criticisms: every featured app demonstrates that Liquid Glass, implemented correctly, serves content rather than obscuring it. But “implemented correctly” requires structural commitment native controls, proper scroll-edge handling, no nested glass effects, careful tinting discipline that most of the App Store has not yet undertaken.
The gallery is not a declaration that the debate is settled. It is Apple’s argument that the debate is winnable, with enough developer buy-in, the right tooling, and enough time for the ecosystem to catch up to what the curated dozen have already figured out.
Where that leaves the ecosystem
Apple’s Liquid Glass developer gallery combines visual evidence, updated guidelines, API support, and in-person events to accelerate a redesign that billions of users have already encountered but that developers are still navigating unevenly, as both 9to5Mac and DesignZig documented at launch.
The featured apps make a real case. Slack accelerated its roadmap, moved search to the tab bar, and gained landscape support as a downstream benefit of going native. Tide Guide extended a coherent design across four platforms. CNN and Crumbl both found that the content-first model produces genuinely better layouts. These are documented outcomes from teams that made the structural commitment Apple is asking for, per the Apple showcase videos.
The harder test is not whether Apple can curate twelve compelling examples. It is whether apps using Liquid Glass become a coherent, legible system once the design reaches teams with fewer resources, frameworks Apple doesn’t control, and device populations where the full rendering pipeline doesn’t apply conditions the gallery was never designed to address, as both Nielsen Norman Group and independent observers have pointed out.
The gallery is best read as a progress report on a transition still in motion. Apple is showing developers what the destination looks like. Whether the broader ecosystem arrives there or settles somewhere messier will take another year to know.