What are the key differences between Material Design and Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines?

Answer:

Material Design and Apple's Human Interface Guidelines diverged again in 2025: Google shipped Material 3 Expressive in May 2025 with bolder shapes and springier motion, while Apple introduced Liquid Glass at WWDC on June 9, 2025, its biggest visual overhaul since iOS 7 in 2013.

Aspect	Material Design	Human Interface Guidelines
Platform scope	Android, Flutter, Angular Material, and the web, built for cross-device consistency	iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS, exclusive to Apple hardware
Visual philosophy	Material 3 (Material You) with dynamic, per-device color palettes; Material 3 Expressive added bolder shapes and motion in 2025	Liquid Glass: a translucent material that refracts surrounding content to signal hierarchy through depth rather than color or size
Customization	Token-based theming; colors can be generated automatically from a user's wallpaper	Limited by design; the glass effect is applied by the system to navigation elements like tab bars and toolbars, not to content lists
Motion and interaction	Spring-based, elevation-driven motion tied to Material's z-axis model	Interface elements can dynamically hide, simplify, or reprioritize themselves based on what the user is doing
Governance	Published openly at m3.material.io, with versioned components teams can adopt piecemeal	Maintained solely by Apple in the Human Interface Guidelines and delivered through SwiftUI APIs like glassEffect

Which platforms should use which system?

When Material Design fits

Material Design fits teams shipping the same product across Android, the web, and sometimes desktop, since its components and tokens are meant to be reused rather than redrawn per platform.

It also fits products that want per-user personalization, since Material You's dynamic color pulls from the device's wallpaper or brand palette without extra design work.

When HIG fits

HIG fits products built natively for iOS, iPadOS, or macOS, where adopting standard SwiftUI controls means Liquid Glass renders automatically without custom rendering code.

It also fits teams that care about matching platform conventions closely, since HIG is Apple's own specification for how a native iOS or macOS app should look and behave.

Which system should a cross-platform team standardize on?

A team building one codebase for Android and the web has little reason to look past Material Design; its theming system was built for exactly that spread.

A team building a native Apple app should design against HIG and Liquid Glass directly, because custom UI that ignores the new translucency and depth model will look visibly out of step with iOS 26 and macOS 26 system apps.

Teams maintaining both an Android and an Apple-native app usually keep two separate design systems rather than forcing one guideline set onto both platforms, since neither Google nor Apple designed their system to be exported wholesale to the other's OS.

Published at: July 20, 2026