Liquid Glass is a gift to the indies [01BY]
I was listening to Accidental Tech Podcast’s discussion of the new design language and one thing that struck me was Marco Arment’s prescient comment that essentially no corporate apps besides Apple’s will adopt it. There are three reasons for this:
- Large corporations have gotten used to treating Apple’s decade-long lack of design as a blank slate on which to paint their “brand”. Suppressing the “brand” to unify with the system appearance is a complete non-starter in the corporate world. If you suggest something like that, you will be laughed out of the room.
- Most smaller corporate apps were designed and built by consultants rather than in-house, and no small company will be able to justify dropping an additional $200K+ on an app refresh.
- Most corporate apps are using some unwieldy cross-platform toolkit like React or Flutter anyway (enough said).
I think the Liquid Glass design presents an opportunity for independent app developers to differentiate themselves from the competition in ways that have not been possible since before iOS 7. The return of texture and depth and active light and subtle animation means that those who treat app development as craft will be able to create vastly different experiences from those created by consultants or even corporate in-house teams whose business motives do not include platform integration or, indeed, delight. (Not all is rosy: the changes to icon dimensions and composition represent a new de-skilling manoeuvre by Apple—but for users, it is hard to say that this is worse than the present dystopia of soulless glyphs.)
These prospects for craft seem not to depend on whether the Liquid Glass design is actually good and accessible for users—it is just complex enough that (good or not) it will lead to the kind of differentiation that we had on both iOS and the Mac OS X platforms in the old days—when an app that was either non-native or poorly crafted (usually both) stood out like a sore thumb in ways that regular users could notice just by touching a control and seeing what happens when you move things around, or finding they can select text that should not selectable, or scrolling to reveal incorrect insets and content boundaries, etc. Attempts to replicate the Liquid Glass material using web technologies will likely lead to stuttering scrolling and drained batteries, which (again) regular users will be able to notice.
So, whilst I’m shaken by the potential for a further degraded user interface on the Macintosh, I’m more optimistic than I thought I would be about the prospects for independent Apple platform application development in the next ten years. I’m also not certain what this means for AquaUI—I need to experiment with Liquid Glass to better understand its strengths and weaknesses before returning to that project.