Overview
To design with the latest iOS 26 updates including Liquid Glass, you must have Tahoe installed on your Mac. If you have an older OS on your Mac, you can still use the most recent version of Play but will see the iOS 18 version of native elements.
If you’re on Tahoe, but don’t want to design with the latest iOS 26 updates, we will support a version of Play without Liquid Glass for a limited time, which you can download here.
If a user views your prototype on a device running on iOS 26, the prototype will always use iOS 26 elements, navigation, and Liquid Glass effects, regardless of which version of Play for macOS you used to design. If they have iOS 18 on their phone, they will see the older iOS 18 materials.
Our strong recommendation is to have only one version if Play for macOS installed at a time. If you chose to keep both apps installed, please note that only one can be open at a time and design file links might sometimes open the incorrect version.
What's Different in Play's iOS 26?
Glass Effect
Glass Effect is a property you can apply to any object from the Appearance Panel. When enabled, it adds Apple’s liquid glass—either regular or clear—so the object refracts background content much like real glass.
This glass effect is automatically applied to all native elements like slider, stepper, picker, and switch, as well as the native navigation bar and native tab bar.
Read more about glass effect here.
Glass Container
A Glass Container combines multiple glass elements into a single shape that can morph together individual shapes into one. You can control the distance at which the morphing begins using the container’s Spacing property.
Read more about glass effect containers here.
Scroll Edge Effect
Scroll Edge Effects create a subtle gradient + blur effect on the edge of a page or scroll container, allowing foreground content to stay visible above the scrolling content. When enabled, nav and tab bars trigger Scroll Edge Effects automatically. For custom foreground items to trigger Scroll Edge Effects, the Connect Edge Effect property must be enabled for the foreground item.
Read more about scroll edge effects here.
Updated Nav Bar & Tab Bar
Native navigation bars and tab bars use the new Liquid Glass style, making them visually responsive to other content on the page. Both the nav and tab bar changes light/dark color based on the scrollable content and morphs buttons between pages. The tab bar now floats near the device’s bottom edge with a glass effect.
Updated UI Elements
Several of Apple’s native elements—Sliders, switches, segmented controls, steppers, pickers, sheets, menus, alerts, and action sheets—look and function differently in iOS 26, and those updates are reflected in Play.
Slider Ticks & Neutral Value
Native sliders can now display ticks indicating steps along the slider’s range. A slider can display ticks for each step, no steps, or for specific steps only, and you can decide if the slider’s value should snap to the ticks or be a more freeform slider.
You can also set an anchor point for the slider’s fill by adding a Neutral Value. For a default slider, this anchor point is the left-most side, making the natural value 0.
Read more about new slider features here.
New SF Symbols & Draw In/Out Effect
We’ve added over 400 new SF Symbols and two new SF Symbol animations, Draw In and Draw Out. These animations show or hide a symbol based on its path, creating a drawing effect.
Read more about Draw In and Draw Out animations here.
Concentric Corners
Create perfectly aligned corners by enabling the Concentric property in each child’s corner radius sub panel. Play automatically matches the corner radius curvature to the parent, so your designs stay consistent. You can choose to enable concentric corners for all corners with the Uniform property or enable individual corners.
