SwiftUI & Liquid Glass in iOS 27: The Complete UI Change Reference

Liquid Glass is Apple's new material and visual design language introduced in iOS 27, bringing translucent, refractive glass-like surfaces to system and custom UI elements. It replaces the frosted vibrancy aesthetic with a more dynamic, depth-aware material that responds to content beneath it.

iOS 27 introduces new SwiftUI drag and drop APIs including reorderable, reorderContainer, dragContainer, and configuration modifiers that enable reordering within and across collections, multi-item drag, and fine-grained control over how data is transferred during drag and drop operations.

PaperKit is Apple's full-featured canvas framework — previously internal-only — now publicly available in iOS/macOS/visionOS 27. It powers the drawing and markup experience in Notes, Preview, and Freeform, giving developers access to a complete pencil, shapes, images, and text canvas with a rich data model.

iOS 27 adds PKStrokeRecognizer to PencilKit, enabling on-device handwriting recognition across 29 languages, plus Bézier path conversion, stable stroke identity, selection access, and programmatic stroke slicing APIs.

Xcode 27 introduces a fully customizable toolbar and theme system, untitled scratch projects, coding agent integration directly in the editor, and the new Device Hub for evaluating apps across simulators and physical devices side-by-side.

The HTML <model> element is a native browser element that lets web developers embed interactive 3D USDZ models in Safari on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS — no JavaScript library required. It was previously visionOS-only and now ships across all Apple platforms in iOS/iPadOS/macOS 2026.

iOS 27 introduces a new CarPlay video app category allowing users to browse and play videos on supported CarPlay displays, alongside major CarPlay framework enhancements including card thumbnails with overlays, a MiniPlayer for now playing, voice control overlays, and navigation panels.

iOS 27 adds soft shadow rendering to RealityKit spotlights and point lights via a configurable lightSize and quality, plus a SurroundingsLightComponent that lets virtual lights illuminate real-world surfaces using the scene understanding mesh.

Safari on visionOS now exposes a JavaScript immersive API that lets websites transport users into full 3D environments using the HTML model element, mirroring the Fullscreen API pattern with requestImmersive(). Developers can build inline 3D previews and seamless transitions into spatial environments directly from a webpage.

visionOS 27 introduces ClippingComponent and enhanced ManipulationComponent placement patterns in RealityKit, enabling multiple users in a SharePlay session to simultaneously manipulate, disassemble, and cross-section structured 3D assemblies in shared space.

Safari 27 introduces Customizable Select, allowing developers to apply `appearance: base-select` CSS to fully style the native HTML `<select>` element and its picker, including custom HTML content inside `<option>` elements, while retaining built-in accessibility and form semantics.

Xcode's coding agents let you generate multiple SwiftUI UI variations from a single descriptive prompt, enabling rapid design exploration directly in native code. Combined with Xcode Previews, you can iterate on layouts, animations, and real content states without leaving the IDE.

Reality Composer Pro 3 introduces Animation Graph, Behavior Trees, Script Graph, Navigation Mesh, and Compute Graph — a suite of visual, node-based editors that let you author character animation, autonomous AI routines, interactivity, pathfinding, and particle effects entirely within the editor without writing code.

The Touch Controller framework lets you add fully customizable on-screen touch controls to your game that automatically surface as a GCController object, integrating directly with your existing Game Controller input pipeline and rendering via Metal.

visionOS 27 introduces Gaussian Splatting support in RealityKit, enabling developers to scan real-world objects and render them as photorealistic 3D Gaussian splats directly in their spatial experiences. This bridges the gap between physical reality and virtual content without requiring manual 3D modeling.

Reality Composer Pro 3 introduces a node-based visual scripting system called Script Graph that lets developers and designers build interactive RealityKit experiences — including full games — without writing any code. Features include drag gesture events, physics integration, prototyped subgraphs, custom events, and live preview directly on Vision Pro.

iOS 26/27 introduces Liquid Glass, a new design language that separates apps into a UI layer (navigation, tab bars, toolbars) and a content layer (scroll views, imagery, color). This architecture lets brand color and content breathe edge-to-edge while native controls float above and dynamically pick up brand colors.

Reality Composer Pro 3 is a standalone tool (no longer bundled inside Xcode) that introduces live on-device preview, GPU-based Compute Graphs, a Lightmapping system for baked indirect lighting, a prototype/instancing workflow, and an AI Assistant that generates 3D objects and materials on demand for visionOS experiences.

SwiftUI now makes it straightforward to compose rich, animated visual pipelines by combining Metal shaders (colorEffect, distortionEffect, layerEffect) with TimelineView for per-frame time-driven animation and alignment guides for precise floating-view attachment. These building blocks chain together like pipes to produce production-quality effects without needing a separate rendering engine.

Xcode plugins can now extend Reality Composer Pro 3 by registering custom ECS components, systems, animation actions, and Script Graph nodes so artists can iterate on 3D content directly inside the editor without rebuilding the app.

tvOS 27 introduces system-wide Dynamic Type support, allowing users to choose preferred text sizes (Large through Accessibility XXXL) in Settings. Apps built with standard UIKit and SwiftUI text styles adapt automatically, while custom layouts can respond via the dynamicTypeSize environment value.

iOS 27 introduces the `accessibilityLinkedGroup` SwiftUI modifier, which lets developers connect multiple separate text views so VoiceOver and Speak Screen navigate across them seamlessly as a single continuous reading experience.

CSS Grid Lanes is a new web layout mode available in Safari 26 that enables masonry-style layouts natively in CSS — no JavaScript required. Items flow into multiple columns or rows, each settling into the shortest available lane while preserving natural proportions.

iOS 27 enforces stricter adaptivity requirements for UIKit apps, making iPhone apps fully resizable in iPhone Mirroring and on iPad, while introducing new navigation bar minimization controls, sidebar opt-in for iPhone tab bars, and prominent tab customization.

iOS 27 brings significant updates to Live Activities and the Dynamic Island, including new expanded presentations, richer interactivity via App Intents directly from the island, and updated layout APIs for more expressive minimal and compact views.

iOS 27 brings a sweeping set of SwiftUI enhancements including Liquid Glass design adoption, new toolbar visibility and overflow APIs, document architecture improvements with Observable, and resizable iPhone app support — all designed to modernize app UIs with minimal code changes.

iOS 27 (and macOS 15) brings the systemExtraLargePortrait widget family — previously visionOS-only — to iPhone, iPad, and Mac, giving widgets a tall canvas to display rich app content. Developers can now support this new family size alongside existing families with minimal code changes.

iOS 27 introduces updated search field placement patterns with Liquid Glass styling, including ergonomic bottom-toolbar search that animates over the keyboard, prominent Search Tab options, and adaptive toolbar search that collapses to a button on constrained layouts.

visionOS supports fully photo-realistic, spatially-aware 360° immersive environments with true depth, parallax, spatial audio, and motion — going far beyond static panoramas. Developers can now surface these environments on both native visionOS apps and the spatial web.

iOS/macOS 2026 adds NSGestureRecognizerRepresentable, NSHostingMenu, and NSHostingSceneRepresentation, making it easier than ever to incrementally adopt SwiftUI inside existing AppKit apps without a full rewrite. Observable tracking in NSView draw methods is also enabled by default.

macOS 27 introduces NSTextSelectionManager for custom text selection in any view, while reinforcing best practices for gesture recognizers, keyboard navigation, and NSWindowRestoration to make AppKit apps feel native and resilient.

iOS 27 introduces NSTextViewportRenderingSurface and NSTextViewportRenderingSurfaceKey protocols, and makes UITextView/NSTextView conform to NSTextViewportLayoutControllerDelegate — enabling developers to override viewport layout lifecycle methods to build rich extensions like line-number gutters without leaving the safety of framework text views.