Liquid Glass showcase: CNN

Hi everyone, I'm Kevin Long, director of Apps at CNN. I've been with CNN for four years, leading our efforts to deliver world class News experiences on iOS and Android. Mobile is at the forefront of CNN's digital strategy. It's where our most engaged users are, whether they're watching live videos, reading breaking news, or getting alerts in real time.

Our goal is to deliver fast, seamless and native experiences that feel right at home on Apple devices.

Our motivation to adopt Apple technologies early stems from three key drivers. First, our users expect the best and most modern experiences.

Second, our internal culture values innovation and creativity.

And third, we see early adoption as a competitive advantage. It allows us to move quickly, learn fast, and stay ahead of rising user expectations, evolving design standards, and the performance benchmarks of other premium apps.

Today, I'll walk through how we've embraced SwiftUI and Liquid Glass in our iOS app, share what we've learned through the design and engineering process.

And highlight how we're continuing to iterate and evolve the experience.

Three years ago, CNN began a major transition to a modern content management system. This shift required us to rewrite our client code, and we use this opportunity to modernize our iOS client architecture and adopt SwiftUI.

At CNN. Our cross-functional squads include engineers, product managers, designers, and QA.

Each platform has its own dedicated competencies, and we collaborate closely to ensure a consistent user experience. And we share learnings across teams while our solutions are tailored to each platform. Each design principle remains unified.

Before the migration. Our code base was a mix of Objective-C, Swift, UIKit, and React Native. Swift offered. SwiftUI offered a unified, modern approach to building views. It simplified layout, made views easier to reuse, and improved state management.

A great example of this is our article rendering. Each element in an article title, byline, image, paragraph was previously represented by separate views, each with its own nib view, logic and ViewModel. With SwiftUI, we were able to consolidate all of this into a single file per element. This significantly reduced the number of files and made the code base easier to navigate and maintain.

With SwiftUI in place, we were well positioned to adopt the new Liquid Glass introduced at WWDC. It's a natural next step. SwiftUI gave us the flexibility to move quickly and Liquid Glass aligned perfectly with our design goals.

To kick things off, we recompile the app in Xcode 26 to see how it looked. This gave us a baseline to start designing for Liquid Glass. Some components, like the tab bar and navigation bar, transitioned automatically and looked great out of the box.

Our design and engineering teams work closely together throughout this process. One of our designers attended a three day workshop with Apple in July. This helped us understand what comes built in with Liquid Glass and what needs to be custom built. We focus on getting the basics right, especially top level navigation, and built quickly from there. Liquid Glass helped us create a more immersive experience, where the UI fades into the background and the content takes center stage.

Beyond the design benefits, building natively with SwiftUI has improved our developer experience. We've seen a notable increase in development speed, especially on iterating on existing designs. For example, when we received internal feedback about spacing and contrast in our article layout, we were able to make and preview changes in minutes using SwiftUI rather than hours of manual testing and layout adjustments.

Adopting Liquid Glass and SwiftUI has brought some unique challenges and wins. I'd like to share a few insights from our journey.

One of the biggest wins was how much of Liquid Glass worked out of the box. The glass modifier is well designed. In most cases, no additional configuration was needed. It adapts beautifully to both light and dark backgrounds, and we saw automatic transmission transitions to Liquid Glass components that made the app feel instantly more modern.

From an engineering perspective, Liquid Glass was easy to integrate, but it did surface a few subtle challenges that required some thoughtful iteration to give our team control over where the effect was applied. We implemented a custom view modifier. It conditionally applies the glass effect only on iOS 26. This allows us to selectively enhance UI elements like the button overlays on our video player, without affecting the broader layout.

This approach worked well, but it also surfaced a few key lessons. Avoid nested glass effect modifiers. Applying the glass effect to both a parent and child views led to visual redundancy. Double translucency, layered blur, and unpredictable rendering. We resolved this by applying the modifier only at the highest level, where the effect was needed, and it created internal guidelines to prevent accidental nesting.

Next, we learned about padding and layout behavior for use with glass effect. Didn't always respect padding as expected. Sometimes stretching or clipping content. We found that wrapping the effect in background or overlay methods helped restore some predictable layout behavior, and we adjusted the padding to sit outside of the modifier scope.

Think about performance considerations. The effect is GPU intensive, especially in scrollable or frequently updated views. We limit its use in high frequency UI areas like list and animations, reserving it for static or top level components like the tab bar and toolbars.

These lessons help us refine our implementation and build reusable components. These components balance both visual polish and accessibility with performance. The result is a cleaner, more immersive experience, one that feels modern and native without compromising usability.

From a user experience standpoint, Liquid Glass helps the interface get out of the way and lets the content shine. Our team has been genuinely impressed by how immersive and clean the new design feels. It's a natural evolution of our design language. Edge to edge layouts. Minimal chrome and a focus on storytelling.

We're watching adoption closely, and we expect feedback to ramp up as more users upgrade. So far, the internal response has been positive. SwiftUI simplifies development and improves velocity. Liquid Glass adds a modern, immersive feel that aligns beautifully with Apple's design direction. Just make sure your team has enough time to test thoroughly, especially around layout and performance.

Looking ahead. We're excited to continue evolving CNN's iOS experience.

This is just the beginning of how Liquid Glass can transform the experience. We're actively exploring and iterating on ideas to see what works best.

We're planning to migrate the tvOS app to share the iOS code base. This will streamline development and allow us to take full advantage of platform specific features like Liquid Glass, while maintaining a consistent user experience across devices.

And to accelerate our ability to adopt new platform features, we're adding a squad dedicated to platform specific innovation. This was a strategic leadership decision, one that reflects our commitment to staying ahead of investing in deep platform expertise.

It builds on the collaborative model I mentioned earlier, giving us the ability to move faster while maintaining tight alignment across disciplines.

Thank you to the Apple team. Your work continues to inspire us. The tools and framework you build empower teams like ours to develop world class experience to millions of users every day.

I also want to take a moment to thank the incredible CNN team, our product managers, designers, engineers and QA partners. Their dedication, creativity, and collaboration made this transformation possible in an incredibly short time. It's been inspiring to see what we can accomplish together.

At CNN. Our mission is to inform and empower people through our trusted journalism. With Apple's continued innovation, we've been able to bring this mission to life in ways that feel more personal, immersive, and native than ever before. We're proud to be part of this journey with you. Thank you.