What s new in uikit with wwdc25

Asked on 06/16/2025

1 search

Tailscan

This post is brought to you by Tailscan, the best devtool for Tailwind CSS.

Want to sponsor? We'd love to chat →

At WWDC 2025, Apple introduced several new features and enhancements for UIKit. Here are some of the key updates:

  1. New Design System: UIKit now supports a new design system centered around a material called Liquid Glass. This material is translucent, dynamic, and features effects like specular highlights and refraction. It is applied to various components such as navigation bars, search fields, alerts, popovers, and split views. This update aims to provide a more vibrant and responsive user interface.

  2. Fluid Transitions: Slide transitions in UIKit are now fluid and interruptible, allowing users to interact with content without waiting for animations to complete. This enhances the responsiveness of apps.

  3. Swift Observable Objects: UIKit has integrated Swift observation at its core, allowing for automatic tracking of observable view references and dependencies. This feature is enabled by default in iOS 26 and can be back-deployed to iOS 18.

  4. Menu Bar on iPadOS: New UIKit APIs have been introduced for the menu bar, a familiar macOS element that is now available on iPadOS. This allows for a more consistent user experience across devices.

  5. Container View Controllers: Improvements have been made to container view controllers like UISplitViewController, which now supports inspectors and allows for column resizing by dragging separators.

  6. Custom Components and Effects: Developers can use the new glass material for custom components and the new scroll edge effect to enhance the legibility of bar buttons and other controls.

For a comprehensive overview of these updates, you can watch the session What’s new in UIKit (00:59) which covers the new design system and other enhancements.

Provide feedback
What’s new in UIKit

What’s new in UIKit

Modernize your app with the latest APIs in UIKit, including enhanced menu bar support, automatic observation tracking, a new UI update method, and improvements to animations. We’ll also cover how you can include SwiftUI scenes in your UIKit app and explore SF Symbols, HDR color pickers, and more.

Build a UIKit app with the new design

Build a UIKit app with the new design

Update your UIKit app to take full advantage of the new design system. We’ll dive into key changes to tab views, split views, bars, presentations, search, and controls, and show you how to use Liquid Glass in your custom UI. To get the most out of this video, we recommend first watching “Get to know the new design system” for general design guidance.

Welcome to WWDC25

Welcome to WWDC25

There’s so much to dive into at WWDC25. Here’s a quick guide to help get you started.