Apple has redesigned its first-party app icons for the second year running, with iOS 27 addressing blurriness complaints about iOS 26 by integrating additional layers of Liquid Glass directly into the icon artwork itself.
When Apple introduced Liquid Glass with iOS 26 last year, it redesigned its entire lineup of first-party app icons to give them a layered glass look with subtle depth. The approach drew criticism from some users who found the results blurry, and in some cases, a heavy specular sheen sat over the icon artwork, obscuring detail and giving icons a washed-out appearance.
The shimmering motion effect that animated icons dynamically as the device was tilted also caused a widely reported optical illusion, with asymmetric highlights in icon corners tricking the eye into reading icons as slanted. With iOS 27, Apple is taking the icon design further rather than rolling it back.
The core change to how icons are constructed is the addition of multiple distinct Liquid Glass layers built into each icon's artwork, rather than the thick glass look applied uniformly over the top in iOS 26. Apple says the new rendering pipeline adds more visual separation between layers, resulting in sharper edges and more defined refractions.
In practice, artwork is now considerably more visible and detailed with higher contrast and greater definition, with the glass look functioning as a refined finish rather than a dominant overlay. The refraction effects between layers are also selectively applied.
The motion-based shimmer has also been significantly reworked. The gyroscopic specular highlight effect introduced with iOS 26 appears to have been removed entirely in the first iOS 27 developer beta. Icons still feature highlights around their edges, now positioned at the top and bottom, but they no longer shift with device movement or produce the tilting illusion, and are much subtler overall.
Icon Composer, Apple's dedicated app icon design tool, has been updated to support building icons from multiple layers of Liquid Glass. New annotation features let developers add refraction effects or fine-tune content effects, while an interactive preview shows how a designed icon will render.
The updated icons are part of broader Liquid Glass refinements Apple announced at WWDC 2026, which also include a new system-wide transparency slider and improved material diffusion for better readability. For a full breakdown of all the Liquid Glass changes in iOS 27, see our dedicated article.
Popular Stories
Apple in iOS 27 will include an enhanced Siri with a dedicated app that gives users options to keep conversations in memory for a limited time, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. Writing in his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman says that Apple is keen to market its privacy credentials as a key advantage in the way it is implementing AI across its software compared to rivals....
Monday May 18, 2026 10:53 am PDT by Juli Clover
iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 will include a revamped AI chatbot version of Siri with new capabilities, but Apple is also planning to introduce new Apple Intelligence features across the operating system, reports Bloomberg. Apple is testing an expanded version of Writing Tools that will do more rewriting and text generation than the current version. There is a "Write With Siri" toggle at the top of...
Monday May 18, 2026 11:13 am PDT by Juli Clover
iOS 27 will include a custom wallpaper generator and an option to automatically create shortcuts using AI, reports Bloomberg. When choosing a new wallpaper, users will have the option to generate something custom using the Image Playground app. Image Playground is used for generating custom emoji and images that can be used throughout iOS, and it is set to get an upgrade in iOS 27. Apple...
Instagram Engineering
Shopify Engineering