Modern mobile apps are defined as much by their visual polish as their functionality. In Apple's new design language, introduced in iOS 26 and across all their latest operating systems (iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe, watchOS 26, tvOS 26, visionOS 26), we have seen a controversial change to Liquid Glass.
Whilst these changes can be exciting for users, they pose a different challenge to developers and businesses and software consultancies, especially when developing products cross-platform.
This guide breaks down what Liquid Glass UI is, the technology behind it, challenges in cross-platform support, and how to start implementing it—especially if you’re using Flutter to deliver simultaneous iOS and Android releases.
The term “Liquid Glass” describes a visual style that feels smooth, fluid, and translucent, mimicking frosted or polished glass.
Liquid glass is a UI design that is supposed to mirror the real-life qualities of glass. It is dynamic in its reflection, refractions and translucent qualities, allowing for a distortion but visibility of the background below. Some frosting of the glass is applied for readability. It is rendered in real time taking advantage of the increase in hardware power available on newer devices. It uses adaptive colouring and lighting to try and adjust itself to light and dark modes or backgrounds. Another area of the makeup of liquid glass is changes to the shapes and corner radii used, aiming to fit the shapes of the devices with a more rounded feel for many of the components. Finally, the animations have seen a change in the liquid glass UI with an emphasis on fluidity and context awareness of their transformations.
One problem of implementing design changes across platforms is that not everything will look at home on every device. Recreating the native widgets of Apple's new liquid will look at home on an iPhone or iPad but will look out of place on an android tablet or phone.Also, many cross-platform systems do not use the native components except for react native. This leads to recreations which may be obvious to some users.
This leaves software developers working in cross platform domain with a tough question, should you design away from this trend and stick with a design language unique to your app that can work on any device. Or should you use packages and custom elements on your releases to the app store? Whilst moving away from the ease of cross-platform development, this may be the best way to keep all users happy.
Flutter is a powerful toolkit for agencies and cross-platform teams because it provides a single codebase for iOS and Android while still allowing platform-native effects.
Fortunately, Flutter includes strong support for Liquid Glass design through its BackdropFilter widget.
For software development agencies, Flutter provides an efficient way to deliver premium UI/UX while keeping project costs predictable and codebases maintainable.
