All Your Brand Are Belong To Us

The last iOS redesign, iOS 7 in 2013, laid the foundation for a neutral, nearly agnostic visual language that third-party developers and companies could build their own brand and corporate design on top of. It was such a clean slate that, twelve years later, most major apps look similar — if not identical — between their iOS and Android counterparts. Ignoring platform exclusives, most apps eschew Apple and Android’s branding in favor of their own.

Liquid Glass, in Apple’s 2026 operating systems, feels like an attempt to reassert control over third-party app branding — forcing others to become a subset of the larger iOS brand and look and feel.

It also strikes me as a defense against the continued growth of cross-platform frameworks by furthering the distance between what’s a “real” iOS app versus a cross-platform app — or even against apps that try to meet in the middle of both platforms design-wise. It will be more challenging to build an app that feels at home on iOS with limited development and design budgets.

Put another way: three days after the WWDC keynote, Liquid Glass feels just as much a strategic business move as it does a design solution in search of a problem. (I’m striking out that last phrase from my original post. It was unintentionally more harsh than I meant it to be.)

(For my younger readers.)