Implementing Liquid Glass UI in React Native: Complete Guide 2025

There’s something irresistibly modern about liquid glass — a blend of translucency, depth, and soft blur that feels futuristic yet calm. This visual trend, a natural evolution of glassmorphism, brings digital interfaces to life through light diffusion, depth layering, and subtle refractions.

In 2025, liquid glass has matured from a passing aesthetic into a functional design paradigm. From Apple’s iOS design language to premium fintech dashboards and cross-platform apps built in React Native and Flutter, it’s the new benchmark for polished, “premium” interfaces.

In this article, we’ll explore:

• What liquid glass UI really means for designers and developers.
• Why it’s trending again in 2025.
• How to implement it efficiently in React Native (with full code examples).
• Under-the-hood insights: how blur rendering works and how to optimize performance.
• Accessibility and UX guidelines for real-world apps.
• Best libraries for React Native and Web (with comparisons and version notes).

What Is Liquid Glass UI?

From Glassmorphism to Liquid Glass

Glassmorphism was popularized around 2020–2021 — defined by semi-transparent layers, blurred backgrounds, and floating elements with soft shadows. It mimicked the look of frosted glass, often overlaid on colorful gradients.

Liquid Glass, however, goes a step further. It’s responsive and dynamic: layers shift with motion, refraction changes with light, and blur intensity adapts to interaction.

Key Visual Elements:

• Real-time translucency with adaptive blur depth.
• Layered perception — elements feel suspended in space.
• Dynamic reflections and smooth, fluid animations.
• Soft edges that respond to motion and user input.

💡 Think of Liquid Glass as “living glass” — not static frosting, but an interactive surface that breathes.

A Brief History of Glassmorphism

The journey to today’s liquid aesthetics spans over a decade of visual evolution.

Early Influences (2007–2013)

• Windows Vista (2007): Introduced the “Aero Glass” interface — the first large-scale use of translucency and blur in UI.
• iOS 7 (2013): Apple brought blur and translucency to mobile (e.g., Control Center), setting a new aesthetic standard.

Trend Emergence (2019–2021)

• “Glassmorphism” gained traction in 2020 following macOS Big Sur’s translucent surfaces.
• Designer communities (Dribbble, Behance) rapidly adopted the style, experimenting with floating cards and blurred panels.

Maturation (2022–2025)

• Platforms like Windows 11’s Fluent Design adopted “Acrylic” materials — a hybrid of blur, transparency, and tint.
• CSS backdrop-filter gained full browser support, making glass UIs feasible on the web.
• Designers pushed toward motion, adaptive depth, and real-time light behavior — giving rise to liquid glass UI.

Why It’s Trending in 2025

Several converging factors explain its resurgence:

1. Hardware Power: Modern GPUs (A17 Pro, Snapdragon 8 Gen 3) handle real-time blur with negligible lag.
2. Spatial UX: As AR and 3D interfaces rise, layered depth and realism are in demand.
3. Premium Feel: Brands associate glass-like visuals with clarity, calmness, and luxury.
4. Cross-Platform Readiness: React Native, Flutter, and Web now offer mature APIs for blur and translucency, bridging iOS and Android parity.

Under the Hood: How Liquid Glass Rendering Works

Understanding what happens behind the blur helps you optimize performance.

Rendering Pipeline

1. Render Background Layers — The app draws underlying content (images, gradients, etc.).
2. Apply Gaussian Blur — A fragment shader samples neighboring pixels to produce a diffused look.
3. Composite Layers — The blurred image is composited with a translucent overlay (tint, gradient).
4. Render Foreground Elements — Text or icons are drawn atop the glass surface.

// Conceptual rendering flow Render(background); ApplyGaussianBlur(radius); Overlay(tint, opacity); Render(content);

Performance Bottlenecks

• Overdraw: Too many overlapping blur layers increase GPU workload.
• Re-rendering: Continuous blur recalculation during animation drains performance.
• Transparency blending: Alpha compositing on low-end devices can cause flicker.

Optimization Strategies:

Implementing Liquid Glass in React Native

Step 1: Setup

For Expo projects:

npx create-expo-app LiquidGlassDemo
cd LiquidGlassDemo
npm install expo-blur

For bare React Native:

npx react-native init LiquidGlassDemo
npm install @sbaiahmed1/react-native-blur

Step 2: Create a Frosted Glass Card

Using expo-blur:

import { View, Text, ImageBackground, StyleSheet } from "react-native";
import { BlurView } from "expo-blur";

export default function FrostedCard() {
  return (
    <ImageBackground
      source={{ uri: "https://source.unsplash.com/800x600/?abstract" }}
      style={styles.background}
    >
      <BlurView intensity={60} tint="light" style={styles.card}>
        <Text style={styles.title}>Liquid Glass UI</Text>
        <Text style={styles.text}>Elegant. Soft. Modern.</Text>
      </BlurView>
    </ImageBackground>
  );
}

const styles = StyleSheet.create({
  background: { flex: 1, justifyContent: "center", alignItems: "center" },
  card: {
    width: 300,
    padding: 20,
    borderRadius: 20,
    alignItems: "center",
    backgroundColor: "rgba(255,255,255,0.1)",
  },
  title: { fontSize: 22, fontWeight: "600", color: "#fff" },
  text: { fontSize: 16, color: "#f2f2f2" },
});

Step 3: Reusable GlassContainer Component

Encapsulate the logic for scalable use:

export const GlassContainer = ({ children, blur = 50, tint = "dark" }) => (
  <BlurView
    intensity={blur}
    tint={tint}
    style={{
      backgroundColor: "rgba(255,255,255,0.1)",
      borderRadius: 20,
      padding: 16,
    }}
  >
    {children}
  </BlurView>
);

Use it across screens as:

<GlassContainer>
  <Text style={{ color: "#fff" }}>Reusable Glass UI</Text>
</GlassContainer>

Libraries & Packages for Blur and Glass Effects

React Native

Web / React

Library Performance Comparison

Adding Motion & Interactivity

Combine blur with animation libraries like react-native-reanimated or moti to bring the glass to life:

import Animated, { useAnimatedStyle, withTiming } from "react-native-reanimated";
const style = useAnimatedStyle(() => ({
  opacity: withTiming(0.9, { duration: 400 }),
  transform: [{ scale: withTiming(1.02) }],
}));

Add this style to your BlurView for smooth press or scroll feedback.

Performance Optimization Tips

Designing a Liquid Glass UI is visually rewarding, but without careful optimization, it can quickly become a performance bottleneck — especially on mobile devices. Here’s how to achieve buttery-smooth results:

1. Limit Blur Layers:
   • Keep your UI to a maximum of 1–2 blur layers per screen.
   • Each additional blur view compounds GPU and CPU usage.
   • For overlays (like modals), stack one blur view and layer other UI elements above it using z-index.

2. Enable Hardware Acceleration:
   Use the prop renderToHardwareTextureAndroid={true} in React Native views to offload rendering to the GPU.
   

   <BlurView
      style={styles.blurContainer}
      blurType="light"
      blurAmount={20}
      renderToHardwareTextureAndroid
    />

   On web, ensure the use of will-change: transform; or backdrop-filter with GPU-accelerated layers to enhance performance.

3. Dynamic Blur Scaling:
   Implement device capability detection using Platform or DeviceInfo and dynamically adjust blur intensity.

   const blurAmount = isLowEndDevice ? 5 : 20;

   This ensures older devices maintain smooth frame rates without sacrificing visual quality.

4. Cache Blurred Backgrounds:
   Avoid recomputing blur on every render. Pre-render blurred images and store them in state or cache.
   Example using react-native-fast-image:

   <FastImage
      source={{ uri: cachedBlurBackground }}
      style={StyleSheet.absoluteFill}
    />

5. Monitor Performance:
   Regularly profile rendering using:

   • React Native Performance Monitor (Cmd + D → “Show Perf Monitor”)
   • Instruments (iOS) or Android Profiler for GPU/frame analysis
   • Flipper Plugin for deeper performance insights

Pro Tip: Combine blurs with lightweight shadows instead of multiple stacked glass elements for the same depth effect with lower cost.

Accessibility & UX Best Practices

Accessibility is critical for any modern UI — even more so with semi-transparent designs. Here’s how to ensure Liquid Glass remains elegant yet inclusive:

• Maintain Adequate Contrast:
  Always verify text visibility against varying backgrounds using tools like WCAG Contrast Checker.

• Respect System Accessibility Settings:
  React Native provides access to user preferences such as “Reduce Transparency” and “Reduce Motion.”
  

  import { AccessibilityInfo } from 'react-native';
  const prefersReducedTransparency = await AccessibilityInfo.isReduceTransparencyEnabled();

• Use Glass as an Accent, Not the Foundation:
  Keep glass effects for cards, toolbars, and modals — avoid full-screen glass backgrounds to prevent readability issues.

• Ensure Theme Compatibility:
  Test Liquid Glass designs under both light and dark modes to ensure text and icons retain visibility and depth.

Pro Tip: For users with blur disabled, offer a non-blurred fallback:

backgroundColor: 'rgba(255,255,255,0.15)'

Integrating Liquid Glass into Your Design System

To take Liquid Glass beyond prototype stages and embed it as a core part of your product, it should be standardized within your design system — this ensures consistent branding and user experience across platforms. At Cygnis, we specialise in mobile app development services and cross-platform UI/UX that bring this kind of premium interface to life.

1. Tokenize Glass Properties:
   Define tokens for blur amount, tint color, saturation, and corner radius in your design tokens (JSON or Figma).

   {
      "glass.blur.light": 20,
      "glass.tint.primary": "rgba(0, 123, 255, 0.25)",
      "glass.radius": 16
   }

2. Component Variants: Create reusable variants:

   • GlassCard.Frosted → Subtle tint and high blur
   • GlassCard.Translucent → Low blur, strong background
   • GlassCard.Dynamic → Changes blur based on content brightness

3. Brand-Driven Customization: Overlay brand colors as faint tints to unify design across web and mobile apps.

4. Cross-Platform Consistency: Example at Cygnis:
   A unified token set that keeps Liquid Glass identical in React Native, Web, and Flutter environments through shared design tokens and stylesheets.

Pro Tip: Maintain these tokens in a central repository (e.g., Style Dictionary, Tokens Studio) to ensure parity between design and development.

Conclusion: Liquid Glass Done Right

Liquid glass is more than a design fad — it’s a visual philosophy that blends realism, motion, and emotional calm. When executed thoughtfully, it creates immersive, premium digital experiences.

With libraries like expo-blur, react-native-skia, and @sbaiahmed1/react-native-blur, and the right performance strategies, your apps can look stunning and run smoothly.