Google appears to be borrowing a page from Apple’s design playbook, with a new YouTube experiment bringing a translucent, floating navigation bar to Android that looks similar to iOS 27’s Liquid Glass interface.
The change was spotted by a Reddit user, who shared a screenshot showing YouTube’s familiar bottom navigation bar with a noticeably different appearance.
Rather than sitting directly against the bottom edge of the screen, the redesigned bar appears to float above the interface, with a semi-transparent background that allows some of the content beneath it to show through. It’s a relatively small visual change, but one that makes YouTube look more like an iPhone app than something built around Google’s own Material 3 Expressive design language.
As reported by Android Authority, the redesign follows Google’s recent decision to remove the Subscriptions tab from YouTube’s bottom navigation bar. While that change affected how users move around the app, this latest experiment is primarily cosmetic, replacing the conventional navigation layout with something that feels closer to Apple’s increasingly glass-heavy approach to interface design.
For now, the floating navigation bar appears to be part of a limited test rather than a wider Android rollout. The report says it couldn’t find the redesigned interface on several Android devices it checked, and we couldn’t find it on the best Android phones we checked.
The change also appears to be controlled through a server-side update, meaning there’s no setting Android users can switch on to get the new appearance. However, the third-party Morphe YouTube patcher has already introduced a similar glass-style navigation bar.
Unsurprisingly, the redesign has divided opinion. Some Reddit users are keen to see the floating interface arrive on their devices, while others have questioned why Google seems to be taking inspiration from Apple when it already has its own distinctive Android design language. It’s a fair criticism, particularly given how much emphasis Google has placed on Material 3 Expressive and making Android feel more visually consistent.
Google hasn’t confirmed whether the floating navigation bar will become permanent or when it might reach more Android devices. Still, the experiment suggests the company is willing to look beyond its own design conventions when updating one of its most widely used apps.
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