Liquid Glass in Android: Specifics of Integration and Maintenance in Design Systems

Designers are increasingly asking to implement the "Liquid Glass" effect to make the UI look modern and consistent across all platforms. But for Android developers, dynamic background blur has historically meant pain, messy workarounds, and FPS drops.

In this talk, I will share our experience integrating "Liquid Glass" effects into Orbita — the design system that powers all Yandex 360 mobile apps. We will explore how to achieve a beautiful backdrop blur without compromising performance and seamlessly embed it into the project's architecture.

What we'll cover:

The Anatomy of Liquid Glass: The components of the effect, what is actually feasible to reproduce on Android, and what should be deliberately sacrificed to maintain a smooth UI.

Custom Implementation: Why we chose not to use the popular Haze library for our design system and built our own dependency-free solution instead.

Optimization Secrets: How to avoid melting the user's phone. We'll discuss downscaling, GPU offloading, and how to make the UI gracefully degrade on low-end devices.

Scaling Across the Project: How to link these effects to design tokens and consistently toggle the glass effect throughout the entire app with a single line of code.