Apple WWDC: Tech giant announces new ‘Liquid Glass’ software design, iOS 26 | Key announcements

Apple's vice president of human interface design announced ‘Liquid Glass’ and said that it will feature transparent visuals that appear glossy on the surface.

Apple WWDC event 2025: The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference is taking place at the tech giant's headquarters in Cupertino, California. The company took the opportunity to announce its new software design interface, "Liquid Glass".

Apple WWDC: This new design is the largest software design for the tech giant since the launch of iOS7 in 2013. (Bloomberg)

Apple said on Monday that it will open up the underlying technology it uses for Apple Intelligence to third-party developers. The tech giant's software chief Craig Federighi said, "This work needed more time to reach our high quality bar."

He also said that the company is planning a design overhaul of all of its operating systems.

Meanwhile, Apple shares dropped 1.9 per cent during the presentation of the new features at the meeting, Bloomberg News reported. The stock was already down 19 per cent this year through to the end of last week.

Apple WWDC25: Liquid Glass, iOS26 & other key announcements

Liquid Glass:

Apple’s vice president of human interface design, Alan Dye, said at the event, “Today marks an exciting and beautiful new chapter for our design, one that sets the stage for our next era of our products and how you interact with them."

He announced the new "Liquid Glass" software design and said that it will feature transparent visuals that appear glossy on the surface.

“It beautifully retracts light and dynamically reacts to your movement with spectacular highlights,” Dye added.

He said that this new design is the largest software design for the tech giant since the launch of iOS7 in 2013.

Apple executives affirmed that this new software overhaul was possible because of the increase power of the custom chips in their devices in comparison to a decade ago, Reuters reported.

iOS 26 release:

Apple's senior vice president Craig Federighi said that the new 'Liquid Glass' design will extend to operating systems for iPhones, Macs, and other Apple products. He added that the tech giant's operating systems will be assigned year names instead of sequential numbers of every version.

This step will ensure that the naming conventions, which have become confusing for users due to Apple's core operating systems for phones, watches and other devices, are unified.

"Our releases for the fall that will power us through the coming year 2026 will be version 26," he stated. The upcoming latest software versions cross all products of Apple will end with '26' - iOS 26, watchOS 26, macOS 26, visionOS 26, iPadOS 26, tvOS 26.

The new OS will be released to all the users this fall, the tech giant announced. The new OS releases will be available as developer betas on Monday, while the public beta will be coming next month.

CHATGPT addition:

Apple Inc. announced that it will be adding OpenAi's ChatGPT image generation feature to its image playground app. However, it clarified that user data would not be shared with Sam Altman's OpenAI without the user's permission.

Apple said that it will add other coding models such as the ChatGPT to its XCode for programming tools.

Call Screening:

Apple upped its calling security game by introducing the "Call Screening" feature, where iPhones will automatically answer calls from unknown numbers and ask them for the purpose of their call. Once the caller state their purpose, the iPhone will display a transcription of the said reason, and will ring for the owner.

The tech giant said it will also add the live translation feature to phone calls, as well as give space for developers to integrate its live translation technology into their apps. For the live translation feature to work, the caller on the other side of the phone call does not necessarily need to have an iPhone.

Additionally, Apple said that it is enhancing the calling experience for users by bringing the phone app to Mac.

Along with phone calls, Apple users will also be able to screen text messages, making it easier for them to sift through spam messages.

Darin Adler, a vice president at Apple, said, that unknown senders appear in a dedicated area where the user can decide if they want to mark numbers as known, or ask for more information, or even delete.

"Until you accept, messages from unknown senders will remain silenced and won't appear as notifications," Adler added.

Apple's Visual Intelligence app:

This is an application which already allows users to surf online for information about images through the Camera app. However, with iOS 26, visual intelligence will also let them search with images appearing on their screen.

For example, if a user wants to know more about a pair of shoes they saw on social media or any platform, they can click on the buttons used for taking a screenshot and then select the visual intelligence icon to get information about or similar products online.