Liquid Glass icons and widgets in iOS 26 add a translucent sheen that quietly reflects the colours and light of your wallpaper. Instead of overlaying solid squares, icons and widgets now feel like panes of tinted glass that float above the background. The result is a layered Home Screen that stays readable while showcasing more of your chosen art.
Apple introduced the feature at WWDC 2025 for iOS 26. Because Liquid Glass is a system-level visual material rather than a demanding computational feature, it runs on any iPhone 11 or newer.
Here is how you can enable Liquid Glass icons and widgets on your iPhone:
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Long-press an empty part of the Home Screen until the icons jiggle. Tap Edit Home Screen > Customize.
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Choose Clear Light, Clear Dark, or Clear Auto. Clear Light stays bright, Clear Dark adds subtle shadowing, and Clear Auto swaps between the two based on your Appearance setting.
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Tap the small sun icon in the corner of the preview to dim the wallpaper behind icons and widgets if labels look washed out, then drag the slider that appears to add contrast.
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Press Done. Your entire Home Screen refreshes instantly, and you can repeat the steps whenever you change wallpapers or want to revert to the default filled icons.
Liquid Glass is purely cosmetic (and beautiful), but a few tweaks help if you use busy wallpapers or have limited vision. To improve legibility, open Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size and toggle Reduce Transparency or Increase Contrast to tone down the effect without disabling it outright.
Developers can flag their widgets for the new material, so expect updates before the final iOS 26 release. Until then, any existing widget still inherits a matching translucent backdrop, so your layout looks consistent.
With just a handful of taps, Liquid Glass transforms familiar icons into shimmering tiles of digital glass, letting your wallpaper shine through. It is a subtle change on paper yet delivers a fresh, modern aesthetic that makes iOS 26 feel both refined and playful, without forcing you to relearn anything.
