Honor unveiled MagicOS 11 at its Global Developer Conference this week, and the new Android skin borrows more from Apple’s Liquid Glass design than any competing software yet. Honor is not the first Android maker to copy the look, but it copied more of it than anyone else has tried.
Honor built the new look on top of what it calls a Luminous Glass architecture, adding translucent surfaces and light-refraction effects across the home screen, Control Center, notifications, and system animations.
Honor Even Copied Apple’s Liquid Glass Intensity Slider
MagicOS 11 includes a slider in its customization settings that lets someone adjust how strong the Liquid Glass effect looks, the same idea Apple introduced with iOS 27’s own Liquid Glass slider. Teaser videos Honor posted ahead of the announcement showed waterdrop-shaped buttons, light refractions, and soft glows lifted closely from Apple’s design language, effects that carry through Photos, the lock screen media player, and Honor’s own Dynamic Island equivalent, called Magic Capsule.
Honor is not shy about where the inspiration came from either. The company’s own marketing language for the update leans on the words liquid glass directly.
MagicOS 11 Adds a Smarter Yoyo AI Assistant and Storage Cleanup Tools
Beyond the visual overhaul, Honor says MagicOS 11 speeds up system animations by up to 20 percent compared to MagicOS 10. Its Yoyo AI assistant was expanded to handle more than 1,000 use cases, chain together sequences of up to 100 steps, and connect with more than 10,000 third-party AI services, though that last figure applies only within China for now.
A new Storage market 2.0 feature compresses data and clears out redundant files automatically to free up space, and MagicOS 11 adds support for connecting two Bluetooth headsets to a phone at the same time.
Oppo and Vivo Already Tried Versions of This Look
Honor is not alone in borrowing from Apple’s design language this year. Oppo’s ColorOS 17 leaned on a similar Liquid Glass look despite Oppo previously saying it would avoid copying the style, and Vivo’s OriginOS 6 picked up some of the same visual cues. Reviewers who have seen early builds of MagicOS 11 describe it as the most thorough copy of the bunch, closer to a direct recreation than a loose interpretation.
MagicOS 11 is rolling out first to the Honor Magic 9 series later this month, following a beta Honor ran on the Magic 8 series over the summer.
