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iOS 26 and Liquid Glass: what to do with your business app before fall

Which WWDC 2025 announcements affect corporate and customer apps, what changes on its own, and what to test on the beta before iOS 26 ships.

Published: 2025-06-17

On June 9 at WWDC, Apple unveiled iOS 26 with a new Liquid Glass design and gave apps access to its on-device model. For an app owner, the short answer is this: standard interface elements will pick up the new look once the app is rebuilt, while everything custom — branded bars, buttons, the icon and cross-platform code — needs checking. There are three months until the fall release, and the beta is already out.

What was announced and what matters to you

AnnouncementDoes it affect a business app?
Liquid Glass, a new design across all Apple platformsYes, this is the main job for the summer
Unified numbering: iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26No, only version names
Foundation Models, access to Apple's on-device modelPossibly, with real limits depending on your audience
Xcode 26 with ChatGPT and models from other providersIndirectly: a developer tool, not a product change
Timeline: beta now, public beta in July, release in fallYes, this is your deadline

iOS 26 will be a free update for iPhone 11 and later. By the end of the year a noticeable share of your users will see the new interface, and an app that still looks the old way will stand out.

Liquid Glass: what changes on its own

Liquid Glass is a translucent material Apple now uses for buttons, switches, tab bars and navigation bars. Controls become a separate layer above the content: the tab bar shrinks as you scroll and expands back, and toolbars follow the rounded corners of the screen. App icons now come in light, dark, tinted and clear looks, and Apple released a dedicated tool, Icon Composer, to design them.

An app gets the new look when it is rebuilt with Xcode 26. If screens use standard iOS components and don't hard-code their sizes, most of the change arrives with no extra work. There is an Info.plist key, UIDesignRequiresCompatibility, that keeps the old design. We would treat it as a stopgap for the transition, not as a way to skip the design work altogether.

You can't postpone the switch for long. Apple makes new SDKs mandatory over time: for example, since April 24, 2025, App Store uploads must be built with Xcode 16 and the iOS 18 SDK. If the pattern repeats, an urgent fix a year from now will have to ship on the new toolchain — and with the new look.

What you'll have to check by hand

Anything built "for the brand" rather than with standard components:

  • Custom bars and menus. A hand-drawn tab bar or header won't turn into glass and will look out of place next to system elements.
  • Content under controls. Now that bars are translucent, photos, charts and colored blocks show through. Check that labels stay readable on real data, not just on the mockup.
  • Brand colors and buttons. A bold fill that worked on a flat interface may clash with the system style on glass.
  • The icon. See how it looks in the dark, tinted and clear variants. If it doesn't work, rebuild it in Icon Composer.

Cross-platform apps

What matters here is how the framework builds the interface. React Native and NativeScript assemble it from native iOS components, so standard elements should pick up the new look just as in a native app — provided the framework and its plugins build with Xcode 26. Verify that on the beta. Both of our mobile case studies — a corporate events platform and a meter verification system — are built with NativeScript.

Flutter draws its own interface, so Liquid Glass won't appear there automatically. On June 10 the Flutter issue tracker noted that the team is not currently developing Apple's new design elements in the Cupertino library. If your app is on Flutter, decide in advance: keep the current look, wait for the framework, or build your own components.

A corporate app is a typical candidate for this check. Our own product, PrimePlanner, an event management system, includes an attendee app for iOS and Android: program, meeting schedule, documents, chats and push notifications. Those are screens full of lists, tabs and navigation — exactly what Liquid Glass changes — so apps like this should be among the first to go through the beta.

Foundation Models: AI in the app without the cloud

The second piece of news for businesses is the Foundation Models framework. It gives apps access to an Apple Intelligence model of about 3 billion parameters that runs on the device itself: offline, without sending data to a server and with no per-request fees. The model can return output directly in the structure the app expects (guided generation) and call the app's own functions (tool calling).

Apple states plainly that the model is built for summarization, extracting data from text, refining text and short dialogs, not for acting as a general-knowledge chatbot. In a business app that could mean turning a free-form comment into form fields, a short summary of a long document, or a draft reply.

The limits are significant:

  • Devices. It needs an iPhone 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max or any iPhone 16, or an iPad or Mac with M1 or later. Check your analytics to see which models your users have: everyone else won't get the feature.
  • Language. Apple Intelligence must be turned on, and the device and Siri language must be a supported one. The list currently covers English and several major European and Asian languages; Russian, which most of our users speak, is neither supported now nor among the languages planned by year-end.
  • Android. The other platform has no equivalent built in, so you'd have to build it separately — otherwise your apps will drift apart in features.
  • Quality. The model is small and can make mistakes. Whatever it fills in, the user should see and confirm.

The takeaway depends on your audience. If your users work in a supported language and on recent iPhones, Foundation Models is worth a pilot. If not — as for Russian-speaking users in 2025 — it's too early to build a core feature on it. Keep it in the backlog as an extra, with a fallback model running on your server.

What this means for business

If your app is native and built from standard components, the main job isn't a redesign but a check: rebuild, walk through the flows, fix your custom elements. If the interface is heavily branded or the app is on Flutter, the scope is bigger, and it's worth estimating before designers and developers leave for summer vacations.

The budget is set not by the announcement but by an audit on the beta: how many screens use custom components and how dependencies behave. The good news is that there's time to do it calmly before release, rather than as an emergency fix after users complain.

The plan for the fall

  1. June: run the beta. Install the iOS 26 beta on a test device, build the app with Xcode 26 and go through the key flows. Take "before" and "after" screenshots.
  2. List of fixes. Separate the changes that came on their own from your custom elements that now look off. Prioritize screens customers and attendees see, then internal ones.
  3. Dependencies. Check that the framework and plugins build: push notifications, analytics, payments, maps. For Flutter, make the call on the look.
  4. Sync with Android. Decide what changes only on iOS and what changes in the app's shared style, so the two versions don't drift apart in logic and navigation.
  5. July–August: fixes and release. Make the changes, recheck on each new beta, and ship an update in time for iOS 26. Put Foundation Models in the backlog as an experiment.

If the app hasn't been updated in a while and there's no team behind it, this is a good moment for an audit: part of the mobile development work will be needed anyway by Apple's next SDK requirement.

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