WWDC 2026: iOS 27 brings expanded Liquid Glass and system-wide AI features

At WWDC 2026 on June 9, Apple announced iOS 27 with several changes that affect what product designers need to account for when building for iPhone.

Liquid Glass, Apple’s design language, is now customizable. Users can apply tinted variations, changing the visual context in which third-party apps render. For designers who have been working with a fixed glass treatment as a baseline, this introduces variability in how backgrounds and translucent elements behave — particularly in apps where visual contrast carries functional meaning rather than serving a purely decorative purpose.

Full-screen homepage widgets are now supported, giving apps a new surface outside the traditional icon-and-widget grid. Designers building apps with strong information-density needs — task management, finance, health tracking — have a new format to design for and test against.

On the AI side, Siri received a significant overhaul and now runs Google Gemini in a dedicated app rather than as a system overlay. The Photos app gains a spatial Reframe tool, an Extend feature for outpainting, and an improved Cleanup function. The Shortcuts app now accepts natural language prompts to build automation flows, which should lower the barrier for users who have historically found Shortcuts too complex to configure.

iOS 27 extends compatibility to iPhone 11 and later, which Apple describes as the widest reach of any iOS release. The combination of customizable Liquid Glass, full-screen widgets, and a more capable AI layer means more variables to test against and a broader range of user contexts to account for during design.