Liquid Glass from Scratch: Breaking Down the System Effect and Recreating It in Metal

Liquid Glass looks like Apple magic, exclusive to iOS 26. But what if you need to support older versions? I'll take the effect apart, recreate it using Metal, and show how I integrated the result into Telegram's codebase as part of their contest.

We'll start with the anatomy of the effect — the optical layers behind Liquid Glass and what Apple does under the hood in iOS 26. From there, we'll rebuild it in Metal: starting with the basics of the GPU pipeline and working up to a shader with multiple render passes. We'll then look at what it takes to integrate this into a real project at Telegram's scale, and compare my approach with the Telegram team's solution using private APIs. Finally, we'll cover the interactive animations that bring the effect to life. No deep knowledge of Metal required — we'll introduce all the necessary concepts as we go.