WhatsApp is giving its Business app on iPhone a fresh coat of paint, and this time the makeover goes much deeper than just a new icon or a tweaked color palette. The company has started rolling out Apple’s new Liquid Glass design language to WhatsApp Business for iOS, bringing a more translucent, layered, and animated interface that’s closely aligned with the look and feel of iOS 26.

If you’ve seen Apple’s own apps on iOS 26, you already have a good mental picture of what Liquid Glass is trying to do. It’s a design system built around glass-like surfaces that refract and reflect what’s behind them, with depth, blur, and motion baked into almost every UI element. Panels, tab bars, and buttons no longer feel like flat slabs stuck on top of a wallpaper; instead, they float, react to your scroll and taps, and subtly shift as the content underneath changes. Apple pitches this as a way to make software feel more “alive” without throwing out the basic iOS layout users already know.

WhatsApp has been experimenting with this look on the consumer app for a while, but the Business app is now catching up with the rollout tied to the WhatsApp Business for iOS 26.5.77 update on the App Store. Not everyone is getting it on day one, though: the Liquid Glass interface is being enabled for a subset of accounts, and then widened over the coming weeks, which means two business owners with the same app version can still see very different UIs. That staggered rollout likely reflects the fact that WhatsApp is still fine‑tuning performance, visual polish, and bug fixes before it goes fully wide.

The most obvious change shows up at the bottom of the screen. The tab bar — where you jump between Chats, Updates, and other sections — now appears as a floating glass strip rather than a solid, docked bar. It’s semi‑translucent, so your chat list or background peeks through, and it uses depth, blur, and opacity shifts to make it feel like it’s hovering above the content. As you scroll or switch tabs, the animations are smoother and more fluid, echoing the motion curves Apple uses system‑wide in Liquid Glass.

Typing a message also gets a visual upgrade for those in the rollout group. Instead of the traditional opaque keyboard, the Business app now adopts a semi‑translucent keyboard that blends into the chat background, mirroring the Liquid Glass aesthetic Apple introduced with iOS 26. It’s not just a cosmetic nod: the glassy look is paired with Apple’s redesigned keyboard and adapted to maintain legibility while still letting some of the wallpaper show through. Users who aren’t yet in the test pool simply continue to see the old, fully opaque keyboard, which is one of the easiest tells that you haven’t been switched over yet.

Buttons and menus throughout WhatsApp Business are being reworked to match this new visual language as well. Action buttons pick up frosted, layered glass treatments that subtly reflect and refract whatever is behind them, and they now respond with more modern, responsive animations when tapped. Context menus — those pop‑up sheets you see when you long‑press on messages or media — also adopt a translucent, glass‑like look, again aiming for a closer match to Apple’s own system menus on iOS 26. Put together, these tweaks make the app feel less like a “port” and more like a native citizen of Apple’s new design era.

Under the hood, this isn’t just a skin. With the iOS 26 SDK, developers like WhatsApp get access to new APIs that make dynamic transparency, depth, dimming layers, and motion easier to implement consistently. Apple’s own guidance for Liquid Glass emphasizes keeping text and key controls crisp on top of translucent panels, often by selectively dimming the background just under labels and icons to maintain contrast. When done well, that balance avoids the classic “pretty but unreadable” problem that early translucent UIs tended to run into.

Right now, though, the experience is still a bit experimental. Reports from early users and coverage tracking the rollout suggest that some elements — the floating tab bar in particular — can behave unpredictably, with occasional visual glitches. That might help explain why WhatsApp is limiting access instead of flipping the switch for every business account at once. From a design perspective, WhatsApp also has to reconcile its own long‑standing patterns (like the familiar chat bubbles and list layouts) with a more aggressive glass‑and‑motion system that could, if overused, distract from the core task: reading and sending messages.

As with any slow rollout, some users are trying to game the system. Over the past few weeks, a few Business users have gone as far as deleting their WhatsApp accounts and recreating them in hopes of forcing a new server‑side configuration that includes Liquid Glass. In some isolated cases, this has worked temporarily, but it comes with huge downsides: deleting your account wipes your chat history, backups, channels, and group memberships, and it can reset any priority your account has built up for future feature access. Even worse, the Liquid Glass interface isn’t guaranteed to stick, with some users reporting that it disappeared again after a while, making this a pretty bad trade‑off just to be early to a UI redesign.​

The smarter move is the boring one: wait it out. The new design is already confirmed to be rolling out to some WhatsApp Business users on the stable App Store build, and it’s compatible with beta versions as well, which means testers have a decent chance of seeing it sooner rather than later. Regular WhatsApp Messenger users are also starting to see pockets of the new interface, hinting that Meta is treating the Business app as a proving ground before aligning both clients on the same visual foundation. Keeping your app updated via the App Store (and TestFlight, if you’re in the beta program) is really all you can do on your side.

For businesses, the impact of Liquid Glass goes beyond aesthetics, even if it doesn’t introduce new features on its own. A more modern, visually coherent interface can make it feel less jarring to switch between Apple’s system apps and WhatsApp Business, which is important if you’re spending hours a day managing customer chats. The subtle depth and motion also help draw focus to navigation, primary actions, and active states, which, if implemented carefully, could make heavy workflows slightly faster and less mentally taxing. It’s a small but meaningful piece of a broader trend where business tools are expected to feel just as polished and “delightful” as consumer apps.

Zooming out, WhatsApp’s embrace of Liquid Glass is another data point in Apple’s push to make this design system the default look across the ecosystem. Liquid Glass spans iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe, watchOS, and tvOS, giving developers a unified set of visual expectations and a shared design vocabulary. When big‑name apps like WhatsApp adopt it properly, it reinforces that aesthetic and, in a way, pressures other developers to follow suit or risk feeling dated next to your chat list. For everyday users, it simply means that over the next year or so, more of the apps you rely on — especially on iPhone — are going to look and move a lot more like Apple’s own.