Ep 141 Design: A bigger strategy behind Apple’s Liquid Glass?

In this episode of The Crazy One, Stephen Gates delves into Apple’s latest design overhaul: Liquid Glass. Unveiled at WWDC 2025, Liquid Glass marks Apple’s most significant UI transformation since iOS 7, introducing a translucent, dynamic interface across all devices. Stephen explores the strategic motivations behind this shift, the challenges it poses for accessibility, and its implications for designers and developers. Drawing parallels to past design philosophies and considering the broader impact on Apple’s ecosystem, this episode offers a comprehensive analysis of whether Liquid Glass is a visionary leap forward or a misstep in user-centric design.

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Transcript

What's going on, everybody? And welcome into the 141st episode of the Crazy One podcast. As always, I'm your host, Stephen Gates. This is a show where we talk about creativity, leadership, design, and a whole host of other stuff that matters to creative people. Now, while you're at it, do yourself a favor. Hit subscribe because we got more new episodes coming up.

The other thing is, if you want to check it out, I am in the process of updating the crazy 1.com. It's the crazy. The number 1.com. It was time the site got an update. We needed some better search. We needed some better episode categorizations. I needed a better platform. You can listen to the shows there so if you have any interest, want to get links, transcripts, stuff like that, you can head over to the site.

Now, historically, what I've always done with the show has been tried to think about what are topics that are going to age well, like what's something that people could come to the show and listen to in six months, a year or two years? Five years is probably a lot, but unfortunately some of the content is hold up, held up, and is still relevant.

But this one on one episode, I want to do a little bit more of a hot take because over the last couple of weeks probably. What's it been a week and a half since Apple did their, Wwdc developers conference, and at that conference, they announced they're what they're calling liquid glass, which is their new unified design system that they're going to take across all of their devices.

And a lot of people have had opinions on this. A lot of things have been said about it. A lot of people have reached out wanting to know what I think about it and thought, you know what? Instead of writing everybody back, doing all that stuff, I'd write a post, but nobody reads it. And who the hell goes on LinkedIn anymore that I just do an episode about this?

Because I think I've got probably a little bit of a different take on what I'm seeing. So I'm just going to do a quick episode to talk about this. So every year Apple gets all their developers together and kind of announces what's the features and functionality that you're going to need to know for the next year. And from an Apple standpoint, I think they have been searching for kind of who is the new face of design since Jony Ive left.

Johnny's successor is a guy named Alan Di. Alan is somebody who came from marketing inside of Apple, who runs what's called the high group human interface that sort of sits at the center of all the Apple's design teams, works on things like this, and then kind of hands it out to the different groups for them to be able to work on it.

Now, look, there's a lot of low hanging fruit that has come along with this because for those of you who might have been under a rock and didn't see it, the UI is basically made to look like transparent glass that is sitting on your desktop, your, you know, iPad, your iPhone, whatever it is, so that the, you know, the icons that you're used to are transparent.

A lot of UI elements are transparent. And that's the biggest thing that everybody went after was what it's like, what is this? It seems to take accessibility and throw it out the window. I'm not sure what problem solving it. And look at I don't disagree with any of that. Like for me personally, and this is not a mode I'm going to use.

I'm not I don't know what problem it's solving from a design standpoint. I will say that from what I've seen and experience with it, it is a mode. It is not the mode. So if you need more contrast and accessibility issues or you have accessibility turned on, I'm going to bet that then liquid glass does not become available for you.

But I think just a few observations on the low hanging fruit. One is that I don't necessarily think or know that this all should be laid at Alan's feet. I think, you know, he is clearly either wanting to or being pushed to step out to be more of the face of design. It was noticeable and interesting for me that Alan joined Instagram or at least created a public Instagram post on July 9th or sorry, June 9th whenever Wwdc was, I noticed that because he started to follow me.

So if you have any interest in what Alan is doing, you can follow him on Instagram. But I just I think that, you know, there are times at Apple and things that happen where decisions aren't always as clear or as straightforward as you might think they would be. And so, yeah, look, I there's problems with the design. I'm not going to excuse that.

But I think that what Apple is doing for me, maybe a little bit of a bigger player, that's why I see it a little bit differently. I do think that it is a side note here that is interesting is I do think it is interesting that they seem to be returning to more three dimensional or skeuomorphic design. I gotta be honest, I always carried a little bit of guilt about that because I kind of felt like one of my designs, or one of the brands that we worked on, might have killed that an apple for a long time.

Way back in the day, whenever they first were launching Apple Wallet, we were one of the launch partners with that. W hotels in particular, was there's a executive who's no longer at Apple named Scott Forest. All Scott was demoing wallet and got to the end. The last card was for use a card that I designed, and they wanted to demonstrate the functionality of how did you get rid of a card?

And so he hit the icon and flipped over and he hit delete. And this kind of just I don't know what crime against design, like little paper shredder or 3D paper shredder, came up from the bottom of the screen and shredded the card, and it sort of felt like that was the moment whenever everybody went like, yeah, look, we've gone too far with 3D and we need to start pulling it back.

Justifiably so. I had nothing to do with the shredder, but it was just somehow I always feel tied to that moment. But it's interesting just because it's noticeable. Even in the video that they showed at Wwdc. Like it goes as far as actually showing designers sitting at a table kind of manipulating and working with what actually look like elements made out of glass, you know, trying to figure out the UI and the interface.

So it's just it's an interesting side note for me that they're returning back to that. But let's take a step back on this and let's think like Apple. And this is why I say not always. Decisions are just simply down to design. Because, you know, I think part of the reaction and part of the frustration that everybody had was what they were expecting was what everybody's been griping about is kind of, where is the next generation?

Siri, we've heard that this was coming. This is supposed to be, you know, I it's supposed to be this big leap forward. You talked about this for years. You haven't delivered or you've under delivered. What we've seen in the apps that are out there are pretty underwhelming in the face of what else is available. So why are you talking about this liquid glass interface and not spending your time working on that?

And I think that's the intersection point where maybe I see this a little bit differently because so much of like in, in a world of AI and of new kind of modern design is you need to look at things through the lens of systems thinking. And this maybe comes out of a more personal experience to me. But if you want to say do AI, and if we know that Apple's approach has always been best to market, not first to market, well then they're going to look at this and say, look, doing another ChatGPT integration or doing something like that doesn't buy us anything.

Does a smarter Siri? Potentially, yes. But if Siri has a deeper integration, if it's something that can actually interact with apps, if it can be more usable, if it can be more functional and under a deeper integration, that is going to be a place where maybe we can win. So to be able to do that, you have to have both a unified design environment and you also have to have a unified tech stack.

And I know whenever I was at Starwood and we said, look, we'd had the idea for doing keyless entry, for doing mobile check in, for doing more proactive and responsive design. And we had that probably 2 to 3 years before we launched it because we said, look, we feel like this is going to be the big idea, the breakthrough idea.

And we went to our partners in engineering who said, look, we're probably realistically going to need 2 to 3 years to get our tech stack to a place where we would actually be able to bring this to life. So we had to backburner that for that 2 to 3 years, to be able to get that in place before we could start to roll it out.

00:08:14:19 - 00:08:35:18
Unknown
And I guess that to me is whenever I look at liquid glass, that's more of what I see is in where they are looking at creating a UI surface that is unified between phones, tablets and desktops, where there is, I'm guessing, a more unified tech stack. And I think, you know, clearly Vision Pro was, influence on some of this.

So I think, you know, obviously because of Vision Pro and other things, they are thinking about what is the future of computing, what is the new form factor? You know, obviously they saw Johnny, I've just sold his startup to OpenAI. That is ChatGPT with the expressed reason that the reason why they bought it was because Johnny had been rethinking what is the future of devices.

And again, I think nobody's looking at this and saying, yes, we feel like, you know, screens and typing and things like that is probably going to be the future. So that's more I guess, the way I'm looking at that liquid glass is that this is probably the setup for them doing deeper integrations for them, having the ability to move between devices much more seamlessly, to be able to have more of an integrated environment, because that's always the problem is, if you don't have an integrated tech stack and an integrated design stack, what you end up doing is designing a scene, an experience that moves across devices like 20 different times, and you end up coding

it 20 different times. Because all of your UI's are a little bit different, your tech stacks are different, and that that will paralyze a business in a heartbeat, because it's just not sustainable to work at that scale across that many other things. I think this is why you'll see smaller design tools companies move so fast and Adobe moves slower is because they're moving at scale with globalization and different.

It's this is the problem. So I think if we put that aside and we look at this from a system standpoint, that's where I'm seeing liquid glass is more of a setup to the future of where they're going now. There is a fly in the ointment on this that I haven't been able to think through, which is, okay, let's say that that assumption is right, that this is the setup for deeper integrations, more unified experiences.

We'll put the glass UI off to the side. And again, that that'll be just something we're just going to. That's a false flag we're not going to look at. But for me it's a timing standpoint of how do they get there. And more importantly for me how do I get access to this to start integrating it into my work?

Because what I'm going to bet is that what they're probably going to do is between now we're in June and the end of the year, they'll do the usual updates, do some hardware, do those sort of things, and then I'm guessing probably around what October they're going to announce probably an upgraded Siri, more of these integrated apps. Because again the new phones and the OS will go probably in September.

They may use that as a set up. So October, November we can do more integrated apps, try to get a bump for the holidays like, oh, these guys are cool. They're thinking about it. This is you know, maybe I shouldn't be as concerned about it, about investing in their ecosystem. So that'll get them through the holidays. What I'm then trying to figure out is, okay, where do we go from there?

Because they'll hold it as an exclusive just for their apps through the holidays. That gives them time and time to test. Maybe they go out early in the year, February, March, where they're going to do it with exclusive partners first access, first movers, good examples of what you know you can do and those sort of things. Going back to the older model, where they're kind of top tier developers would get access to things first, showed in keynotes, yada, yada.

But what that means then is that for the average developer, for the average app and things like that, we've got to wait a year till we get to Wwdc next year to be able to get our hands on that and see if that theory is true. And I think for me, it's just the pace at which I and everything else is moving right now.

That timing feels kind of insane. But I think for their ecosystem, that would be the only moment where they could get developers together to be able to walk them through that level of integration and those sort of things. Answer the questions, roll it out, do those sort of things. So is it possible? Sure. Is it probable? And does it feel like a good move, or are they going to have to really do something big if that's the truth, yes, but only time will tell.

But so that's it for me is I'm not as focused on like, you know, the glass and the UI and those sort of things that everybody else is looking on. But I think if we look at this from a systems perspective, is this the moment where they're finally going to break down? Because, look, it's notable for me that whenever you look at, you know, the iPad OS for the first time ever.

And they were very clear in resisting that they had resisted for a long time. Giving that laptop features. Well, now suddenly there's a cursor, there's a top menu right. Like it. It looks very laptop like. And for I think a certain set of people could clearly become a replacement for them. That's an interesting move. So I like I said, I think we're seeing a lot of these integration points and then blurring lines that I hadn't see them be willing to blur before that sort of feeds into this theory.

But look, only time will tell. And look, as always, I'm curious. I think, you know, if you see this in a post on LinkedIn, let me know what you think. Leave a comment in whatever your podcast platform is like. You know, again, are you thinking about this a different way? Because I think this is always the best when it's done that way.

But I think that's why I said, knowing what I know about Apple, having been on the inside of it, that is more of what I see it as and where I think the direction it's going to go. And it'll be curious to see if time proves that to be right or wrong. But let me know what you think and we'll take it from there.

So keeping it short, keeping it sweet, keeping it focused just on this one thing. So hey, as always, thanks for listening. I know time is only there. All still remains the only true luxury for all of us. I appreciate you spending any time listening to the show and hey, as always, stay crazy.