Prime Highlights
- Apple fires Jon Yongfook, the Liquid Glass UI designer, just some hours following the iOS 26 launch.
- Yongfook makes public his switch to Samsung, the place he’ll direct interface design developments.
Key Details
- Jon Yongfook led the event of the Liquid Glass UI for iOS 26 and different Apple platforms.
- The brand new consumer interface emphasizes blur results, floating toolbars, and glass-like transparency.
- The designer’s departure got here after customers and designers obtained combined reactions after launch.
Key Background
Apple has let go of Jon Yongfook, the principal designer of its just-released Liquid Glass UI, lower than per week after the world premiere of iOS 26 throughout its WWDC 2025 convention. The Liquid Glass interface was the graphical spotlight of Apple’s latest working system releases throughout iOS 26, macOS 26, iPadOS 26, watchOS 26, visionOS 26, and tvOS 26.
The Liquid Glass UI has been created to introduce a glass-like, clear, futuristic look to Apple’s complete universe. It makes heavy utilization of Gaussian blur results, hovering toolbars, and glassy overlays to offer apps and menus with a extra immersive and liquid-like visible look. This redesign represented Apple’s greatest design change because the onset of flat design with iOS 7.
Yongfook had spearheaded the design venture for greater than a yr, testing out real-world influences like how bodily supplies reply to gentle. The end result was a layered, semi-transparent interface Apple marketed as a bridge between digital design and bodily habits. Throughout the firm, the venture was considered a design management assertion, marrying visible magnificence with material-based UI innovation.
However the response to the brand new UI was various. Whereas some welcomed the futuristic design and Apple’s braveness in revamping its model, others lambasted the interface as too flashy and will compromise readability. Some likened it to the retro “glass” theme of Home windows Vista, whereas incapacity rights activists expressed considerations concerning how the clear layers may impression visually impaired customers.
Yongfook responded to the criticism on social media, saying that the design was based mostly on intensive commentary and materialism. He previewed future codenames of future iOS designs like “Orangutan,” “Rattan,” “Sweet,” and “Sashimi,” which promised further visible evolution. Nonetheless, his announcement ended with the surprising revelation that he had been laid off at Apple and could be taking over shimmering 1-pixel border design roles at Samsung’s Galaxy UI crew.
His surprising exit has fueled rumors of potential internal struggles or discontent with the UI reception. Even with the setback, Apple continues pursuing its Liquid Glass imaginative and prescient, which persists on the core of iOS 26 and future platform releases. The tech neighborhood now awaits anxiously to watch how Apple responds based mostly on suggestions—and the way Yongfook’s ideas proceed to develop at his new vacation spot, Samsung.
