Tech
Apple's Liquid Glass UI: A Clear Challenge or a Transparent Opportunity for Your App?
Gareth Reese
October 8, 2025
Apple has just unveiled iOS 26, and with it comes Liquid Glass, which is Apple's most profound redesign of its operating system since the move from skeuomorphism to flat design. For app developers, this is a watershed moment. Native apps built with SwiftUI can adopt this beautiful, dynamic new aesthetic with relative ease. However, for the cross-platform world, this stunning new UI presents a serious challenge, creating an immediate "fidelity gap" that could leave your app looking obsolete on day one.
Here's the situation: your carefully crafted cross-platform app, designed to offer a consistent experience on both iOS and Android, is about to feel completely alien on millions of updated devices. This isn't just about looking dated, it's about breaking the seamless, intuitive user experience that people expect from the Apple ecosystem.
This can force you into an unwelcome corner. Do you ignore Liquid Glass and maintain a single, unified design system, knowing your app will stick out like a sore thumb on iOS? Or do you invest significant time, money, and resources into building a custom, iOS-specific version of your app, undermining the very reason you chose a cross-platform framework in the first place?
The solution is to make an informed choice. By understanding precisely how each major cross-platform framework is equipped to handle this change, you can build a clear strategy. This guide breaks down the options, the trade-offs, and the path forward.
Liquid Glass is more than just a new coat of paint. It's a fundamental reimagining of the user interface as a tangible, physical material. It's defined by three key principles:
UI elements behave like physical glass, reflecting and refracting content beneath them in real-time.
Components dynamically morph and transform based on user interaction, creating a liquid-like quality.
The UI leverages Apple's powerful silicon to produce lighting effects and highlights that react to the physical movement of the device itself.
This is the new gold standard for iOS, affecting everything from buttons and toolbars to the Home Screen icons. For users, it will quickly become the new normal. For developers, it's the new bar to clear.
Frameworks like Flutter and Compose Multiplatform, which use their own rendering engines to draw every pixel on the screen, are completely insulated from native UI changes. This means they get no automatic updates when operating systems change their UI. Their pre-packaged iOS-style widgets (like Flutter's Cupertino library) instantly become legacy artefacts. React Native, which often bridges to native components, faces a similar issue as its standard libraries now target an outdated aesthetic.
This creates the "fidelity gap," forcing a difficult choice between maintaining brand consistency and embracing platform fidelity.
React Native is in a strong position, thanks to a mature ecosystem. Its secret weapon is that its foundational blur libraries are thin wrappers around Apple's native UIVisualEffectView. This means they get high-performance, pixel-perfect blur effects for free.
Building on this, the community has a professional, dedicated solution: @callstack/liquid-glass. This library provides a high-fidelity toolkit that replicates not just the look but also the distinctive merging and morphing interactions of the native design. For teams needing ultimate control, React Native Skia offers a direct line to the GPU for creating completely custom, high-performance effects from scratch.
Flutter's control over every pixel is both its greatest strength and its biggest liability. While it gets no automatic updates, its architecture allows developers direct GPU access via custom shaders. This has led to a spectrum of community-driven solutions.
Packages like glass_kit offer a simple, static frosted-glass effect using Flutter's built-in filters. They are stable and easy to implement but don't capture the dynamism of Liquid Glass.
The experimental liquid_glass_renderer package uses custom shaders to simulate true refraction and liquid-like merging effects. It's powerful and promising but is not yet production-ready and comes with performance caveats.
For Flutter teams, the path is less clear, forcing a choice between a simple approximation and a powerful but potentially unstable high-fidelity solution.
Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) offers a unique flexibility that sets it apart. It allows teams to choose between two distinct paths:
This approach shares business logic in Kotlin but builds the UI entirely with native SwiftUI. This is the "no-compromise" solution, guaranteeing a pixel-perfect Liquid Glass implementation from day one, at the cost of maintaining a separate UI codebase for iOS.
For teams prioritising code reuse, Compose Multiplatform shares both logic and UI. Like Flutter, it renders its own UI, but the ecosystem has a solution in the Haze library. Haze is a tool that provides a high-quality, performant approximation of the Liquid Glass effect, complete with advanced features like gradient blurs and masking, but without the liquid-like merging.
The arrival of Liquid Glass confirms a new reality in mobile development. For an application to feel truly cutting-edge, high-level declarative widgets are no longer enough. The future belongs to frameworks that offer a layered architecture: productive high-level components combined with a low-level "escape hatch" to the GPU.
The "best" framework choice is now a more nuanced decision than ever, based entirely on your project's priorities.
Is your app ready for the transparent future?
Navigating a major platform shift like Liquid Glass requires expertise and strategic foresight. Don't let your user experience be shattered by iOS 26. At Foresight Mobile, we specialise in crafting beautiful, high-performance native and cross-platform applications that feel right at home on any OS. We live and breathe this stuff, from deep-level graphics optimisation to pixel-perfect UI implementation.
Contact us today for a free, no-obligation consultation to discuss your app's roadmap and ensure a seamless transition to the Liquid Glass era.
