Liquid Glass showcase: LTK

Hello, I’m Jeseka Hahn, VP of product design at LTK.

You know that moment when a creator shares something and you think to yourself, I need that? Well, that's LTK it's a social community for recommendations across everything you're into. And millions of people trust LTK creators purchasing $6 billion in recommendations every single year.

Today, I'll share three lessons we learned when we made one bold decision to rebuild our app with SwiftUI from the ground up, using Apple's native design at the core.

Start small, work smarter, not harder, and build trust. And I know these are easier said than done, so we'll get into it in a second. Okay, so change starts small. Imagine for a moment the situation that we were in in 2024. Social media platforms were shifting constantly, algorithms were changing, and AI was multiplying the noise for our creators whose livelihoods depend on being seen. This chaos was hitting close to home, and the reality was we couldn't move fast enough to help our creators.

Years of layering onto an aging framework had made our app too heavy, too slow, and too expensive to evolve. We had to rebuild, and we had to rethink how we worked.

We needed a true design system, which we didn't have at the time, one where design and code work in harmony.

We needed to build with Apple's native OS for faster iteration and scalability, and we really needed a team. Leadership included, willing to trust the process.

Believe it or not, we only gave ourselves four months to do this, and we had to because we had to keep up with the industry changes. And you're probably thinking what could go wrong? Well, let me tell you what went right.

To set ourselves up for success. We started small with a single humble button and it helped both our design and development move faster.

It then grew into patterns and screens and a shared language and into a design system we named runway.

At LTK. We have a phrase for how we make hard tradeoffs, brutal prioritization, and let's just say the name fits. Armed with our design system, we started to reevaluate our app.

We audited the information architecture. We questioned every flow, every pattern to see what truly added value. And what we found was we were solving the same problem in multiple ways, even for something as simple as a product card. And hey, I know this happens to the best of us, right? There's no shame here. We've all been in this place where we're testing and iterating and adding to our apps, and I know we don't always get the chance to come back and clean up and remove things, but we had no choice. We had to move faster. And so we used our design system and we started cutting. And let's just say this wasn't easy. The debates, they got lively, right? Yeah. The prioritization, it got brutal.

But this process showed us that saying no to more could help us focus on what really matters.

Simplifying gave us the speed to move faster.

Teams had greater confidence because they weren't second guessing the details.

And since debates got calmer and collaboration got stronger, we gained the space to think bigger.

Which set us up to work smarter, not harder.

Rewriting the app in SwiftUI. It felt bold. However, we knew it was the smarter long term decision. But first, we had to convince our founders that it was worth hitting pause on current work. And we all know this isn't easy, right? Like, how do you tell your founders hold off on all of those requests while we rebuild this, right? So what really made a difference was that one of our principal engineers built a side by side demo, showing how long it took to build a page with our design system in SwiftUI versus without.

And now I would love to finish this demo, but like I'm on the clock here. So as you can see, without a design system, this just keeps going and going and going and going. And honestly, once our leaders and founders saw this, the debate ended.

Brutal prioritization wasn't just about cutting features. We also learned it meant slowing down to rebuild the right way.

Runway now expresses the LTK brand. And by embracing native components, we elevated our brand in a powerful way. And we realized something. Our identity should not compete with creator content. It should complement it.

We could now move quickly to ship long requested features like dark mode and widgets with ease. Now innovation came naturally and with every new iOS release.

These were design, engineering and leadership wins and proof that when teams align, they move faster and they move together. And that's where trust begins. First, trust in a system, then trust in each other. And finally we got trust from our users.

Before iOS 26, we were spending weeks trying to fine tune the layout, working to make creator content shine. But with Liquid Glass, the controls blended in seamlessly and creators content finally took center stage. Our creators noticed too. They celebrated and told us they felt heard.

And since we rebuilt our foundation with our new design system in SwiftUI, adopting iOS 26 wasn't just another rebuild. It became an upgrade and that foundation helped us to move faster. We then simplified our navigation and brought new innovations to life, like a new dedicated search tab.

We also adopted visual intelligence. Now, creators can snap a photo and instantly find creators content on LTK.

This was a breakthrough. Our creators literally cheered for this at this year's LTK Creator Conference because it gave them more ways to be discovered.

So instead of telling you how all these efforts paid off, let me show you.

Compile time was cut by almost 70%. Faster builds led to less time waiting and more time innovating.

App size dropped by almost half.

And since our initial relaunch in February, time spent in the app went up 138%.

Yay! Yeah. Thank you.

And since the iOS 26 launch, search usage doubled overnight. These aren't just performance metrics. They're proof of all the lessons that we learned while we started with a button. We ended up building a movement. And today, creators, consumers and brands share a stronger home in LTK. It's now more seamless, more human and trusted.

LTK is real people with real communities. And as our co-founder Amber Venz Box likes to say, we're just getting started. Thank you.