Apple’s annual dev shindig, WWDC25, kicked off on June 9, unleashing a barrage of ‘magical’ new features. However, the real test comes not from a stage-managed keynote but from living with the updates.
I installed the developer betas so you don’t have to. Here’s a sneak peek at how apps will look and feel when these operating systems land later this year.
Liquid Glass: Transparently awful
Who needs legibility when you’ve got an iPhone? Not Apple!
If you caught the WWDC25 keynote, you’ll know Apple execs wouldn’t shut up about the company’s new design language, Liquid Glass. This visionOS-inspired look is supposed to increase focus, reduce distractions, and put content first. The tiny snag: it doesn’t (yet) achieve any of these things.
The new glassy theming too often makes devices borderline unusable. Gigantic toolbar buttons on iPad (and Mac) comically loom above other content. Glass surfaces are everywhere. Content beneath interface elements remains visible to the point that you regularly cannot easily read what’s on buttons and in text fields.
It smacks of Windows Vista, which itself was hardly a roaring visual and usability success. And while Apple’s radical iOS 7 design in 2013 was divisive, it was at least rooted in key design principles of typography and grids. Liquid Glass feels closer to a tech demo that’s escaped into the wild. I hope by September that clarity (and common sense) will prevail.
Redesigned iPhone apps: Hide and seek
Music with its collapsed tabs and questionable Liquid Glass design. Good luck reading what’s on those overlaid glass elements!
Having apparently decided last year’s Photos revamp was a triumph, Apple is welding unified interfaces to other apps. The upshot during my testing: a weird mix of ‘hide the feature’ and fast access to things I care about.
Music now puts a search button at the bottom of the screen, where it’s more readily accessible. Other tabs collapse into Home, which is fine, because I never use them. But that might not be the case for you. And I found the same approach infuriating in Safari, which minimizes every button the second you scroll. Worse, even when you do scroll downwards to get the buttons back, you find All Tabs is now an extra tap away, buried in the new ‘…’ dumping ground menu. Settings lets you revert Safari to something resembling the older design, but Music doesn’t. It’s clear which way Apple is heading.
Elsewhere is a similarly mixed bag. I like how Phone combines favorites, recent calls, and voicemails in one place. But Camera now hides modes behind a twitchy Video/Photo menu, as if an Apple exec is whispering in your ear, “We simplified the camera by hiding everything.” It’s not a great look and it strikes me that third-party apps sticking with more traditional tab-based setups have an opportunity here.
iPadOS and windows: Back to the Mac
Has Apple finally got iPad windowing right? Quite possibly, yes.
Originally, the iPad interface had no windows. It was a resolutely full-screen device, with you swiping between apps. But as iPads grew more powerful, with bigger screens, user demands changed. Split View arrived, and then we later got the finicky, complicated disaster that was Stage Manager.
iPadOS 26 frustratingly bins some of the good (including both Split View and also Slide Over), retains the bad (Stage Manager), and yet comes out a winner due to yet another revision of how iPad windows work. One option is a basic full-screen-only mode that’s almost iPad retro. But then there’s the new Mac-like windowing mode.
Windows can be freely resized. The Mac’s ‘traffic light’ window controls (close, minimize, maximize) are present and reveal window tiling options when held. You can also ‘flick’ windows left and right to organize two windows in a manner akin to Split View. Even in this early beta incarnation, the result feels sleek and flexible. And Mac users will welcome the arrival of a menu bar for accessing app commands, even if it’s hidden rather than permanently visible. (It seems Apple isn’t quite ready to combine iPadOS and macOS just yet.)
None of this is perfect. Like the iPhone changes, these iPad updates take some getting used to. But it does feel like a step forward, unlike the iPhone’s step sideways and Liquid Glass’s stumble into a hall of mirrors. Still, there’s a summer of tweaks ahead. So here’s hoping Apple listens to feedback and gives us more substance – and less half-glassed gloss – by September.