Accessibility

Apple's material honours three system settings. Android has an exact analogue for one of them, a partial one for another, and none at all for the third. That asymmetry is the whole content of this page.

Reduce Transparency — no Android setting exists

iOS has it. Android does not, at any API level. So reduceTransparency is driven by whatever control your app exposes, and an app that ships this material without offering one is giving users less control than iOS does.

LiquidGlassTheme(
    background = ground,
    reduceTransparency = if (prefs.reduceTransparency) 1f else 0f,
) { App() }

It raises the material's opacity rather than switching it off, which keeps the shape and the edge lighting intact for anyone who wants to keep seeing them. It is a slider, not a boolean, if you want to offer that.

Increase Contrast — a partial analogue

AccessibilityManager.isHighTextContrastEnabled is the nearest thing, and it is about text rather than materials, so treating it as Apple's setting is an approximation rather than the same thing. Say so in your settings copy if you surface it.

LiquidGlassTheme(background = ground, increaseContrast = if (highContrastEnabled) 1f else 0f) { App() }

Both settings apply to every glass element under the theme. A theme nested inside another changes them for its subtree only.

At 1 the material goes predominantly black or white — chosen against the backdrop's luminance — with a contrasting border. That is Apple's stated behaviour: the effect becomes solid rather than disappearing, so the element keeps its shape and its affordance.

Reduce Motion — a real analogue

Settings.Global.TRANSITION_ANIMATION_SCALE == 0 is a genuine equivalent.

Apple's guidance is that Reduce Motion "decreases the intensity of some effects and disables any elastic properties", which maps cleanly:

val response = if (reduceMotion) GlassInteraction.ReducedMotion else GlassInteraction.Calm
Modifier.glassEffect(Glass.Regular.interactive(response = response), CircleShape)

GlassTabBar(..., motionEnabled = !reduceMotion)
val materializeSpec = if (reduceMotion) GlassMotion.MaterializeReduced else GlassMotion.MaterializeIn

ReducedMotion drops the press scale, the bounce and the gel, and halves the glow. The feedback survives, the elasticity does not — which is what the setting asks for, rather than removing the response altogether.

What is not covered

There is no Android equivalent of iOS 26.1's system-level Clear/Tinted "preferred look for Liquid Glass", nor of 26.2's Lock Screen transparency slider. If your app wants those it has to offer them itself.

Vibrancy: the gap you cannot close

Apple's largest legibility mechanism for content on glass is automatic — a label "becomes vibrant based on its textColor", and on the Regular variant everything placed on the glass gets it, with symbols flipping light/dark in lockstep. That is a compositing mode inside Apple's own renderer.

Compose has no equivalent, and a fragment shader drawn behind content cannot touch that content. The nearest available approach is one light/dark decision per element (see Adaptation) handed to both the glass and whatever draws the labels; today that decision is the app's, through LiquidGlassTheme(dark = …), since backdrop-driven inversion became internal on 18 October. It works, and it is coarser: one decision per element per frame, not per glyph. A label straddling a light/dark boundary in the backdrop will not track it the way Apple's vibrancy does.

Design around it. Do not put small text over glass that sits on a high-contrast backdrop and expect the platform to save it.