Liquid Glass Plus #

⚠️ EXPERIMENTAL - USE WITH CAUTION #

This package is still experimental and should not be blindly added to production apps for all devices. While performance has improved significantly, liquid glass effects in Flutter are computationally intensive due to the limited access to the GPU and may not perform well on all hardware configurations.

Before deploying to production:

• Take a look at the Limitations and Performance sections before even thinking about using this package in production.
• Make sure your App is built on Impeller. Skia is unsupported for now
• Test thoroughly on your target devices, especially lower-end and mid-range devices
• Monitor performance metrics (memory usage, frame rates, power consumption, jank)
• Use fake: true strategically: Set LiquidGlassLayer(fake: true) for layers that are not highly visible or have low visual impact

We need your feedback! Please test on your devices and report performance characteristics, issues, and suggestions.

A Flutter package for creating a stunning "liquid glass" or "frosted glass" effect. This package allows you to transform your widgets into beautiful, customizable glass-like surfaces that can blend and interact with each other.

Features #

• 🫧 Implement Glass Effects: Easily wrap any widget to give it a glass effect.
• 🔀 Blending Layers: Create layers where multiple glass shapes can blend together like liquid.
• 🎨 Highly Customizable: Adjust thickness, color tint, lighting, and more.
• 🔍 Background Effects: Apply background blur and refraction.
• ✨ Interactive Glow: Add touch-responsive glow effects to glass surfaces.
• 🎭 Fake Glass: Skia-compatible glass approximation using backdrop filters instead of custom shaders.
• 🤸 Stretch Effects: Apply organic squash and stretch animations to glass widgets.
• 🎬 Implicit Animations: Shape and settings changes are automatically animated (changing between shape types not yet supported).

Real glass (left) and fake glass (right) with implicit transitions for frost, intensity, shape, radius, and size.

Installation #

In order to start using Flutter Liquid Glass you must have the Flutter SDK installed on your machine.

Install via flutter pub add:

flutter pub add liquid_glass_plus

And import it in your Dart code:

import 'package:liquid_glass_plus/liquid_glass_plus.dart';

How To Use #

The liquid glass effect is achieved by taking the pixels of the content behind the glass widget and distorting them. For the effect to be visible, you must place your glass widget on top of other content. The easiest way to do this is with a Stack.

Make sure to read the Performance section for tips on getting the best performance out of the package.

Stack(
  children: [
    // 1. Your background content goes here
    MyBackgroundContent(),

    // 2. Create a layer for liquid glass effects
    LiquidGlassLayer(
      // 3. Add your LiquidGlass widgets here
      child: LiquidGlass(
        shape: LiquidRoundedSuperellipse(borderRadius: 30),
        child: const SizedBox.square(dimension: 100),
      ),
    ),
  ],
)

What's in the box? #

This package provides several widgets to create the glass effect:

⚠️ Limitations #

• Skia uses an approximation: On non-Impeller platforms (Skia), a linear transformation approximation is used instead of the custom shader which performs non-linear transformations to achieve the glass-like look. The visual result is similar but not identical.
• Shape type transitions are not animated: Changing between different shape types (e.g., from LiquidRoundedSuperellipse to LiquidOval) will happen instantly. Only changes within the same shape type (e.g., border radius) are animated.

🚨 A word on Performance #

The liquid glass effect is computationally intensive, especially on mobile devices. To save GPU cycles, liquid_glass_plus will try to cache geometry in textures wherever possible.

Best Practices

To ensure the best performance when using liquid glass effects, consider the following tips:

• Use LiquidGlassLayer for shapes that share the same settings. Creating many individual layers is expensive.
• Minimize the amount of pixels covered by LiquidGlassLayer: The layer will create textures that cover its entire area. Try to keep these areas as small as possible. If you have a large area with sparse glass shapes, consider splitting them into multiple smaller layers.
• Limit animations: The glass effect is almost free while shapes remain in the same position onscreen. Moving shapes forces the package to re-render their glass effect every frame, which is expensive.

Examples #

LiquidGlass: A Single Glass Shape #

To create glass shapes, you must wrap them in a LiquidGlassLayer. This layer manages the rendering of all glass effects within it.

import 'package:flutter/material.dart';
import 'package:liquid_glass_plus/liquid_glass_plus.dart';

class MyGlassWidget extends StatelessWidget {
  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Scaffold(
      backgroundColor: Colors.white,
      body: Stack(
        children: [
          // This is the content that will be behind the glass
          Positioned.fill(
            child: Image.network(
              'https://picsum.photos/seed/glass/800/800',
              fit: BoxFit.cover,
            ),
          ),
          // The LiquidGlassLayer manages glass rendering
          Center(
            child: LiquidGlassLayer(
              settings: const LiquidGlassSettings(
                thickness: 20,
                frostIntensity: 10,
                glassColor: Color(0x33FFFFFF),
              ),
              child: LiquidGlass(
                shape: LiquidRoundedSuperellipse(
                  borderRadius: 50,
                ),
                child: const SizedBox(
                  height: 200,
                  width: 200,
                  child: Center(
                    child: FlutterLogo(size: 100),
                  ),
                ),
              ),
            ),
          ),
        ],
      ),
    );
  }
}

If you need a single glass shape with custom settings and don't want to create a separate LiquidGlassLayer, you can use LiquidGlass.withOwnLayer:

LiquidGlass.withOwnLayer(
  settings: const LiquidGlassSettings(
    thickness: 15,
    frostIntensity: 8,
  ),
  shape: LiquidRoundedSuperellipse(borderRadius: 30),
  child: const SizedBox.square(dimension: 100),
)

Note: Make sure you have read the Performance section for tips on getting the best performance out of the package.

Supported Shapes

The LiquidGlass widget supports the following shapes:

• LiquidRoundedSuperellipse (recommended) - A smooth, rounded squircle shape
• LiquidOval - A perfect ellipse/circle
• LiquidRoundedRectangle - A rounded rectangle

All shapes take a simple double for borderRadius instead of BorderRadius or Radius, since they don't support non-uniform radii.

Customization #

LiquidGlassSettings #

You can customize the appearance of the glass by providing LiquidGlassSettings to a LiquidGlassLayer or LiquidGlass.withOwnLayer(). All glass widgets within that layer will share these settings.

LiquidGlassLayer(
  settings: const LiquidGlassSettings(
    thickness: 10,
    glassColor: Color(0x1AFFFFFF),
    lightIntensity: 1.5,
    outlineIntensity: 0.5,
    saturation: 1.2,
  ),
  child: // ... your LiquidGlass widgets
)

Here's a breakdown of the key settings:

• glassColor: The color tint of the glass. The alpha channel controls the intensity.
• thickness: How much the glass refracts the background (higher = more distortion).
• frostIntensity: Background blur/frost strength (0 = no blur).
• refractiveIndex: The refractive index of the glass material (1.0 = no refraction, ~1.5 = realistic glass).
• lightAngle, lightIntensity: Control the direction and brightness of the virtual light source, creating highlights.
• ambientStrength: The intensity of ambient light on the glass.
• outlineIntensity: The visibility of the glass outline/edge.
• saturation: Adjusts the color saturation of background pixels visible through the glass (1.0 = no change, <1.0 = desaturated, >1.0 = more saturated).

Increasing saturation when using colored glass helps achieve an Apple-like aesthetic.

Note: Changes to LiquidGlassSettings or the LiquidShape are automatically animated with smooth transitions. Simply update the values and the glass effect will interpolate to the new configuration. However, changing between shape types (e.g., from LiquidRoundedSuperellipse to LiquidOval) is not yet animated.

Adding Blur (Frost) #

You can apply a background blur using the frostIntensity property in LiquidGlassSettings. This is independent of the glass refraction effect.

LiquidGlassLayer(
  settings: const LiquidGlassSettings(
    frostIntensity: 10.0,
    thickness: 20,
  ),
  child: // ... your glass widgets
)

Child Placement #

The child of a LiquidGlass widget can be rendered either "inside" the glass or on top of it using the glassContainsChild property.

• glassContainsChild: false (default): The child is rendered normally on top of the glass effect.
• glassContainsChild: true: The child is part of the glass, affected by color tint and refraction.

Fake Glass Mode: Skia-Compatible Alternative #

When Impeller is not available (Skia rendering), fake glass mode is automatically used. It provides a similar visual effect using backdrop filters instead of custom shaders. No configuration is needed - the package detects the rendering backend and switches automatically.

If you want to force fake glass mode even when Impeller is available, you can set fake: true on the layer:

LiquidGlassLayer(
  fake: true, // Force fake glass (normally auto-detected)
  settings: const LiquidGlassSettings(
    frostIntensity: 10,
    glassColor: Color(0x33FFFFFF),
  ),
  child: LiquidGlass(
    shape: LiquidRoundedSuperellipse(borderRadius: 20),
    child: const SizedBox(
      height: 100,
      width: 100,
      child: Center(child: Text('Fake Glass')),
    ),
  ),
)

Note that performance is similar or slightly worse than real glass on Impeller, so there's no performance benefit to forcing fake glass.

Note: Fake glass mode ignores refractiveIndex; thickness only affects faux lighting/edge effects, not true refraction.

GlassGlow: Interactive Touch Effects #

Add responsive glow effects that follow user touches. Wrap your content with GlassGlow inside your glass widget. The GlassGlowLayer is automatically included by LiquidGlass.

LiquidGlassLayer(
  child: LiquidGlass(
    shape: LiquidRoundedSuperellipse(
      borderRadius: 20,
    ),
    child: GlassGlow(
      glowColor: Colors.white24,
      glowRadius: 1.0,
      child: const SizedBox(
        height: 100,
        width: 100,
        child: Center(child: Text('Touch Me')),
      ),
    ),
  ),
)

The glow effect automatically appears at touch locations and fades out smoothly when interaction ends.

LiquidStretch: Organic Squash and Stretch #

Add interactive squash and stretch effects that respond to user gestures, creating an organic, jelly-like feel:

LiquidStretch(
  stretch: 0.5,
  interactionScale: 1.05,
  child: LiquidGlass(
    shape: LiquidRoundedSuperellipse(
      borderRadius: 20,
    ),
    child: const SizedBox(
      height: 100,
      width: 100,
      child: Center(child: Text('Stretchy')),
    ),
  ),
)

The widget listens to drag gestures and applies smooth squash and stretch transformations without interfering with other gestures.

For more details, check out the API documentation in the source code.

Acknowledgments #

This package started as a fork of flutter_liquid_glass by whynotmake.it.

Why the fork?

1. Platform-agnostic focus: This package aims to create beautiful glass widgets without replicating the entire iOS glass behaviour (such as cross-widget morphing/blending). We intentionally keep things more platform-agnostic. Replicating actual iOS widgets (like the bottom bar) may be done as a separate package building on top of this one.

2. Production-ready simplifications: Some features were simplified to make the package more production-ready, and implicit animations have been added (with more to come).

3. Improved Skia compatibility: The fake glass (Skia) implementation looks significantly closer to the Impeller (shader-based) implementation than the original. However, this comes at a slight performance cost when testing on Impeller.