WWDC 2025 – Liquid Glass

Liquid Glass

Today was day one of WWDC 2025. The most exciting part will be the new UI. Apple calls this design aesthetic “Liquid Glass” and I couldn’t be more excited.

Image from Apple demonstrating their new Liquid Glass design.

The best way most people will understand this change is that it is taking the learning from the Vision Pro and taking it across the rest of the Apple ecosystem. However, this appears to be an oversimplification. The way that Liquid Glass behaves is much more like water droplets on a service. Think of how water will refract items below them. This will make your device seem more “alive”.

Seeing how Apple is taking this across all devices, watch, tv, Vision Pro, iPhone, iPad, and macOS this will hopefully make it easier for people to adapt to the new UX..

Xcode enhancements

The second exciting thing from today’s announcements is that Apple is allowing third party models to be used within Xcode to help in coding. By default you can attach your OpenAPI / ChatGPT account; however they have made it expandable to other models, either on your device or via API keys. This is a huge upgrade, and will allow developers to quickly get up to speed in using an AI to simplify some of their coding tasks.

I have been using Visual Studio Code’s integration with chatGPT, Alex, and Perplexity for some of these tasks, but a first party integration into Xcode is a game changer. In the past I have quickly run through Alex’s free tier, chatGPT has been ok, but has issues with accessing my projects when they are under GIT, and Perplexity right now would require me to cut and paste my projects onto their servers.

iOS 26

Screen shot from Vision Pro of apple executive standing in front of large iOS icons
iOS Icons in space!

This section of the presentation was more about the UI changes, with major improvements; all designed to expand content to the edges of the screen. Time was spent on the new phone app! Where they have redesigned the UI to pull together most of the content on the main screen, and expose some of the content that you may not remember. Overall, there were the usual large list of changes to apps like Camera, FaceTime, Messages, Music, Maps, Wallet, Gaming, Visual Intelligence, and more.

There were two types of changes, UX changes to take advantage of the new design language and functionality changes that are taking advantage of more Apple Intelligence features.

The key message continued to be that developers can use AppIntents to be included in all the cool up coming Apple Intelligence features.

watchOS 26

A few key updates to watchOS:

  1. The new Workout Buddy feature. This will use on device AI to build motivational commentary while you work out. The coolest part to me was that the voice they used in the demo appeared to be based on “Sam” my favorite Apple Fitness instructor.
  2. The Notes app is now available on the watch. I use Apple notes a lot, so this is a nice addition for me.
  3. Updates to the Smart Stack. This has been slowly becoming more useful for me.

tvOS 26

tvOS features map floating in Vision Pro view

Not much here other than a new Karaoke mode in the music app that allows everyone to use their iPhone to sing. Everything else seems to be UX changes.

macOS 26 Tahoe

macOS Features page floating in Vision Pro screen

The biggest things here, besides UX matching with Liquid Glass:

  1. ability to color folders and add emojis – yes this will kill a few utilities I use
  2. the Phone app is now available on the mac
  3. Continuity – Live activities are now available on the Mac, and will auto launch the app on the iPhone if you are using mirroring.
  4. Shortcuts – you can now tell a shortcut to use Apple Private Cloud Compute,
  5. Spotlight – I think this version has finally taken me to the point where I don’t need Alfred any more. I took Alfred off my set machine to see how I do this summer.
  6. Gaming – Yes the new gaming app is here too. I tested it to see if it would find non-App Store apps on my machine. Nope.. not yet

visionOS 26

visionOS Features page floating in Vision Pro vies

Other than the UX changes across all other devices, this was the most exciting one for me. It appears to me that visionOS is now at the level of a version 1.0 operating system. I believe that the average person can now find things that might make visionOS a daily drivers.

  1. Widgets are finally available. I can’t believe that I said “finally” the OS has not been around that long. I need to check my Widgets in wasted time this summer.
  2. Support for the Sony VR2 controllers and an upcoming Logitech device for writing in 3D Space.
  3. Persona’s are so much better. The left one is the new persona, the right one is the original.

iPadOS 26

iPadOS features page floating in visionOS space.

This is probably the most impactful set of updates. The iPad has been a great productivity device for me, I use it to edit my weekly podcast (Games At Work dot Biz), take notes on it during meetings, follow my social media feeds, read RSS, read books, watch media, and play games. I would love to do more on it. My M4 iPad Pro is just as powerful as my M2 Max MacBook Pro.

The biggest change is the Multitasking subsystem appears to no longer be throttled. As a developer you can now update your app to process in the background in a manner that makes sense. This means long running processes can be kicked off, and they will run!

The windowing system is finally basically the same as on a Mac, i.e. fully resizable. The mouse pointer is now a pointer, not a blob, and tiling is much more mature. Oh, and now you have menu bar at the top of the screen.

You also have improvements in Files. The Preview app is now available on the iPad!

And finally, as a podcaster, you can now do local recording of your audio input, allowing for the double ender editing that we use for our podcast.

So much more

There was so much more, and I will spend the week going through over 50 of the 100 sessions that Apple released yesterday. Looks like it will be another exciting summer.