Liquid Glass is Apple's new material and visual design language introduced in iOS 27, bringing translucent, refractive glass-like surfaces to system and custom UI elements. It replaces the frosted vibrancy aesthetic with a more dynamic, depth-aware material that responds to content beneath it.
ā¢ System controls like tab bars, navigation bars, and toolbars automatically adopt Liquid Glass, giving apps an updated look with zero code changes
ā¢ SwiftUI exposes a new `.glassEffect()` modifier so custom views can opt into the same material, letting developers build surfaces that visually integrate with the new design system
ā¢ The material adapts to light/dark mode, wallpapers, and underlying content dynamically, reducing the need for manual tinting or transparency management
iOS 27 introduces new SwiftUI drag and drop APIs including reorderable, reorderContainer, dragContainer, and configuration modifiers that enable reordering within and across collections, multi-item drag, and fine-grained control over how data is transferred during drag and drop operations.
iOS 27 enforces stricter adaptivity requirements for UIKit apps, making iPhone apps fully resizable in iPhone Mirroring and on iPad, while introducing new navigation bar minimization controls, sidebar opt-in for iPhone tab bars, and prominent tab customization.
PaperKit is Apple's full-featured canvas framework ā previously internal-only ā now publicly available in iOS/macOS/visionOS 27. It powers the drawing and markup experience in Notes, Preview, and Freeform, giving developers access to a complete pencil, shapes, images, and text canvas with a rich data model.
In-depth guide
SwiftUI & Liquid Glass in iOS 27 āiOS 27 brings significant updates to Live Activities and the Dynamic Island, including new expanded presentations, richer interactivity via App Intents directly from the island, and updated layout APIs for more expressive minimal and compact views.