WhatsApp’s slow transition to Apple’s Liquid Glass design has reached the video player, one of the last major parts of the iPhone app still using the old interface.
The update gives video playback the same frosted, translucent appearance now found across much of the app. The progress bar now sits as a floating, rounded panel at the top of the screen. In light mode it uses a white glass effect, and in dark mode it switches to a darker tint. The playback controls at the bottom of the screen have been redesigned to match, so watching a clip no longer feels like stepping back into an older version of the app.
On its own, it’s a small change. What stands out more is how long WhatsApp has taken to get here. Apple introduced Liquid Glass with iOS 26 in 2025, and WhatsApp began testing it in October that year. The redesign didn’t officially roll out until May 2026, after months of very limited availability. The iPad app started receiving it in June, the Mac app followed in July, and individual parts of the iPhone app have been updated piece by piece since then. The new video player was first spotted in development in August, so even this relatively minor change took around two months to start reaching users.
As with almost every WhatsApp feature, availability is uneven. Meta usually enables changes server-side in stages, which means two people running the same version of the app can see completely different interfaces. Many iPhone users still report having the old design throughout the app, so getting the new video player first requires already having the wider redesign.
There’s an argument for taking things slowly. Liquid Glass has been criticised since launch for readability problems, with translucent elements sometimes making text and controls harder to see against busy backgrounds. Apple eventually added an option to make the effect more opaque. A video player is a particularly difficult test, as the controls float over constantly changing images, so a cautious approach is understandable.
Even so, for an app used daily by billions of people, a redesign split this unevenly across devices and accounts makes for a disjointed experience. Some users have a fully updated app, others are stuck with a mix of old and new elements, and many still have neither. With the video player done, WhatsApp is close to finishing its Liquid Glass makeover on Apple devices. Whether it reaches every user before Apple’s design language changes again is another matter.
