Issue 714

13^th June 2025

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Did you have a good WWDC week? As always, I won’t try to sum up the entirety of this week’s announcements in today’s issue. We have the whole summer to explore it all. There’s no rush.

Let’s start with Liquid Glass and the new design refresh. So far, all we’ve seen is the stock Apple apps, some demo apps, and sample code. These present the new design in the best possible light, as they should. What we’ve seen so far is supposed to guide our decisions as we design and ship our ‘26 platform releases.

I’m sure many of you have already compiled your apps against the new SDKs to see what state they are in. The only person I’ve seen doing a show and tell on this so far is David Smith with his post “Rule #1: No HIG Exceptions, No Custom UI”. The whole post is worth your time, but his conclusion should be no surprise given the title of his post.

Where this gets interesting to me is how this might affect app design across the entire industry. iOS has always led the way in mobile design, and while I’m not saying nothing flows back in the other direction, the iOS 7 re-design in 2013 had a huge influence that was echoed in Google’s Material Design a year later. Will Liquid Glass have a similar effect? I’m not suggesting that everything on every mobile platform will suddenly have glass effects everywhere, but will we see more depth, shadows, and texture in popular Google apps in a year or two?

Of course, the elephant in the room is that many of the top apps on iOS are built with cross-platform frameworks and won’t immediately get access to updated native components or anything that looks like it. There’s also the non-technical challenge of many of these apps still subscribing to the “it needs to look the same on all platforms” school of thought. I don’t expect to see messages in WhatsApp or news articles in the New York Times app sliding around on glassy surfaces any time soon.

If I had to predict right now, we’ll probably end up somewhere in the middle. It’s possible that Apple will slightly tone down some parts of the new design before it ships. Smaller native apps will adopt the fundamentals like new-style tab bars and navigation, but will leave some elements untouched. Huge apps like those I mentioned above will probably not make any major changes, but will we see a little more texture and warmth in mobile design? It’s possible.

– Dave Verwer

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Tools

Pedro Piñera presents a round-up of developer tooling highlights from this year’s conference, including a comment on container and containerization:

I can’t help but wonder why Apple invested in their own open-source solution when we already have Docker and Podman. But I guess as Swift spreads to other ecosystems like web servers or Swift executables that run on Linux OSs, controlling the developer experience of using Swift in those environments at a lower level makes sense.

When I first saw those words, I thought Apple might have enabled macOS inside a container! Unfortunately, we’re not that lucky, at least not this year. 🤞

Code

I think the “finally” in the post title is justified! Web views are not hard to wrap in SwiftUI controls, but I’m also happy we’ll never need to do it again. Daniel Saidi has a write up of the new view and his plans to deprecate WebViewKit. Read the full post for a great overview of the new API’s capabilities.

Here’s Jordan Morgan’s regular-as-clockwork look at UIKit enhancements despite the surrounding SwiftUI excitement. He makes a sharp observation:

This is interesting, as the common line of thinking was that as SwiftUI evolved, the gap between it and UIKit would widen.

Instead, it’s shrinking.

He’s talking about UIKit gaining Observable support. He also lists some smaller improvements at the end of the post. UIKit isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

After seeing Joe Fabisevich’s BlueSky post, I did a bit of research. As far as I can tell, Claude Code and Cursor won’t yet automatically find these files in your dependencies, but there’s a proposal to change that. Until then, you can always manually tell the agent about the location of this file. I’d love to see more packages add these files as this kind of documentation will really help the LLMs.

Design

I suspect Sketch and maybe Figma will simplify the creation of this effect in design files in future versions, as doing this process repeatedly would be a pain. However, it’s interesting to see Erik Kennedy create it from scratch!

Business and Marketing

Ariel Michaeli on some potential changes to the App Store search algorithm:

Now that Apple is reading keywords from captions, every character counts. Instead of fluff, use captions that match real keywords users are searching for.

For example, “Track Sleep Patterns” is a very active caption and gives you “track sleep”, “sleep patterns”, and “track sleep patterns”, keywords people are looking for. However, “Wake Up Refreshed” isn’t because no one’s searching for that.

This is great advice, and not only for SEO! It’s also easy to imagine that Apple has started to OCR your app’s screenshots so it rings true.

And finally...

I took every sit archive on the WayBack machine I could find. I’ve expanded them all, applied the schemes, screenshot and cropped the images and delivered it to you here.

Where’s the Liquid Glass theme? 🔎