Google is preparing a Liquid Glass redesign for YouTube and YouTube Music

Apple’s Liquid Glass design language has been hit-or-miss, depending on whom you ask. Our survey last year showed that readers overwhelmingly prefer Google’s Material 3 Expressive over Liquid Glass. That doesn’t change the fact that this is a core design element of iOS and will continue to be adopted by other third-party apps. The YouTube and YouTube Music apps appear to be next on that list.

A screenshot shared on X by MacRumors analyst Aaron Perris reveals what appears to be newly added feature flags, including for Liquid Glass. While it’s unclear which particular app this screenshot is from, Perris says both Google apps will get the UI update to match a key element of the iOS design language.

In addition to Liquid Glass, YouTube and YouTube Music will gain support for Live Activities, as shown in the screenshot. While it’s hard to think of a real-world use case for this feature in the YouTube app, the source suggests it may be related to displaying sports scores on the Dynamic Island interface via YouTube TV. However, this hasn’t been officially confirmed yet.

Since this is basically an early reveal courtesy of feature flags, we don’t yet know what Liquid Glass will look like on YouTube and YouTube Music. However, apps like Google Chrome and Gemini on iOS currently offer this design element, blending in well with the operating system. So we have a general sense of what it may look like. Meanwhile, popular iOS apps like Gmail and Maps still haven’t switched to Liquid Glass.

While we’ve seen some Android smartphone makers lean too heavily into Apple’s design language, most third-party Android app developers are largely staying away from Liquid Glass, though there are some exceptions.