Apple’s next innovation might be a ‘Liquid Glass’ iPhone

One of the more divisive elements of last year’s raft of Apple OS updates was the new Liquid Glass interface design. This shimmery aesthetic was supposed to bring cohesion across the iPhone, Mac, Vision Pro, and other Apple products, but ended up causing legibility issues and a certain amount of irritation. Happily, however, it appears the company does not think Liquid Glass as a brand is beyond redemption.

According to a Twitter/X post by the prolific leaker Ice Universe, Apple is working on a next-gen iPhone display that will use the same Liquid Glass branding as the software it runs. In a first for the company’s smartphone line, this display will be curved, but Ice stresses that the curvature will be “extremely subtle,” unlike the curved screens we’ve seen on Android phones over the years.

“What truly creates the visual impact may be a sophisticated combination of optical refraction, light guiding structures, and carefully engineered visual illusion,” the leaker explains. “The end result could be a display where the bezel nearly disappears from sight, while edge viewing remains natural and undisturbed.”

From the wording of the post (“may,” “could,” and so on) it’s apparent that this is a theory rather than a definite plan. Ice Universe also doesn’t cite any sources or otherwise specify where the information comes from. So at this point it’s best to regard this as speculation: a product concept which Apple is plausibly exploring, but isn’t close to launching, nor guaranteed to get there at all.

The timeframe isn’t clear from the post either. Ice refers to it as Apple’s “next-generation display,” but it’s almost certainly destined for Apple’s 20th anniversary iPhone due to arrive in 2027. We already know the big design change for late 2026, and that’s the folding body of the iPhone Ultra, while the iPhone 18 Pro is likely to be far more iterative upgrades on their respective predecessors. However, it’s been heavily rumored that Apple is planning to launch an iPhone with “curved glass edges all around” to mark it’s 20th anniversary.

As Ice Universe acknowledges, curved phone displays have been around for a while; the first commercially available Android device to offer this was the Samsung Galaxy Round way back in 2013. (The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, pictured above, came out in 2023.) Apple has even done curved displays itself: Apple Watches have screens that curve down subtly at the edges in order to disguise the bezel.

It will therefore be interesting to see how Apple presents it as a new breakthrough, if it does so at all. Perhaps the company will focus, as it does so often, on the experience rather than the details. Its upcoming iPhone Ultra, for example, is not even close to being the first folding smartphone, but will surely be presented as the first to do it right. Expect a similar approach with the Liquid Glass display.