Sorry folks, Liquid Glass isn’t going anywhere

Reports of Liquid Glass’s death were, it seems, greatly exaggerated. According to a new report, Apple has no plans to move on from the divisive software design for at least another year.

In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman discusses Apple’s plans for iOS 27 this year, and concludes that, other than a new chatbot version of Siri, it will focus on fixes rather than features. And later in the newsletter he clarifies that this means we shouldn’t expect a new look.

In the Q&A segment, Gurman responds to a question about recent personnel changes in Apple’s design team and whether that means the company will rethink its user interfaces. (It’s been speculated that Alan Dye’s departure in December was related to Liquid Glass’s mixed reception.) He argues that it does not.

“When [Dye] left for Meta at the end of last year, there was a lot of ink spilled over whether or not this would lead to major UI changes,” he writes. “Perhaps even a shift away from the new Liquid Glass interface. My sense is that this is extremely unlikely.”

Gurman’s rationale is that Apple doesn’t make decisions lightly or on the whim of a single employee, and that on a corporate level there is still enthusiasm for Liquid Glass. “[Dye] didn’t develop the iOS 26 interface himself or unilaterally decide to go in that direction,” he explains. “The company still loves it.”

As unpopular as Liquid Glass has proved in some quarters, with users complaining that its transparency effects are distracting and can make text more difficult to read, it was always unlikely that Apple would get rid of it completely after just one year. Going back to the iOS 18 style would be an admission of defeat, and producing yet another visual aesthetic so soon would be an enormous ask. (Such radical changes are very rare for iOS. Before iOS 26, the last was iOS 7 in 2013, which also wasn’t universally liked.)

As with the initially disastrous Apple Maps, it would be far more characteristic to make a few small concessions or even a mea culpa, and then work to gradually improve rather than start from scratch. Many disgruntled users are more annoyed by iOS 26’s bugs and performance issues than the way it looks, and a stability update, as we’re now expecting this year, might go a long way to getting those users back on side.

iOS 27 will be announced and demonstrated at WWDC in June, and then rolled out to the public in the fall. For all the latest news and rumors, bookmark our regularly updated iOS 27 superguide.