I think this is a clever moat Apple created with Liquid Glass: they picked an effect that is easy to make a worse version of, but very hard to do the real/right way (and humans have an intuition for real/right because they see real glass every day). So any copycats will look worse in a way that's pretty obvious and Apple gets to keep the "premium-looking" product.

I don't think it's that hard for someone with experience writing shaders to emulate. The moat is that it's almost impossible to replicate with browser technology, which hurts web-based ui systems and is still a big challenge with something like flutter or jetpack compose multiplatform.

Stuff like React Native get it basically for free because their ui is still technically "native".

But apps that rely on web views are screwed and I'm sure Apple will be happy to push devs away from those solutions as they're inferior for users.

Now they just need to figure out a way to push RN apps towards true native.

I think the same is true for when they started using blurs everywhere. They knew Android OEMs would copy it in a worse way and shoot themselves in the foot. That's also why material design doesn't rely on blur effects, it needs to run well on much worse hardware.

It's fun seeing the attempts to mimic Liquid Glass though, the most impressive so far is this Flutter package: https://pub.dev/packages/liquid_glass_renderer

I recently saw a large gold (plated) surface - larger than a hand. The effect the light played off of that metal was amazing, I've never seen the effect in small gold jewelry. Photographs and video just don't capture it. If Apple ever turns their attention to gold and manages to nail that effect, I would consider one of their devices just for that aspect.

The moat is real! I haven't tried recreating Liquid Glass in the browser yet. From what I've seen, it's possible, but not in a practical, cross-browser, "can be applied to an arbitrary component" kind of way.

Of course, as soon as we figure out how to get it done, Apple will move on to the next thing. I'm okay with that though. It was a bold move, and I can't imagine how much time and money Apple spent making Liquid Glass look that good.

That is one way things could turn out. On the other hand, when Apple started to introduce the iOS-7-style frosted glass effects, we got backdrop-blur in CSS, which handles the hard parts of achieving a similar effect on the web.

If this whole liquid glass effect catches on big time (which isn't out of the question right now), we might see something in the web platform that gives developers access to the platform primitives required to render it.

Why shouldn't there be an effort to make more OS UI elements available via HTML? There's no technical reason against it. So I'm not saying that is what's going to happen, but I don't think this is a kind of moat they created with the explicit intention to make web apps worse.

They literally said this is the reason in their marketing.

> features an entirely new material called Liquid Glass. It combines the optical qualities of glass with a fluidity only Apple can achieve

https://www.apple.com/ca/newsroom/2025/06/apple-introduces-a...

But yeah, it is a pretty clever way to make most cross-platform toolkits stand out and create a desire to create true native apps which increases their moat and means that some apps will have only an Apple version (or a worse app on other platforms) rather than releasing the same app on all platforms.

I think you overestimate how much most users are able to detect such differences and will care about it.

Somewhat like the blind tasting tests of Coca Cola versus Pepsi versus supermarket brands.

I think the other component of the moat is that their OS/GPU stack is power-optimized for this effect in hardware, which generic solutions for generic hardware will have trouble matching - even a lower fidelity replication’s power drain could be an order of magnitude higher as a result.