A day after Apple introducing new user interface (UI) feature Liquid Glass at its worldwide developers conference in California, an X user by the name Jon Yongfook (@yongfook) shared a tweet on June 10 stating he and his entire team had been fired by Apple even though they worked tirelessly for 18 months.
Several Indian media outlets picked up the story and began reporting on it. Republic Bharat, News24, IndiaTV, and Ahmedabad Mirror published reports claiming that Apple had fired the chief designer behind the Liquid Glass UI and his entire design team, and that this termination happened just a few hours after the official announcement of iOS 26. However, after the story began receiving scrutiny, all the outlets either updated their articles to correct the information or deleted them altogether.
NDTV Profit and Gadget 360 Hindi, both owned by the Adani Group, also published similar stories amplifying the same claims. The report published by NDTV was also republished by MSN.com.
‘Intended as Satire’
Alt News conducted a search of Jon Yongfook’s profiles on X as well as LinkedIn. Upon examining his professional history, we found no confirmation indicating he had ever been employed by Apple. His X profile bio however, clearly states that he is the founder of BannerBear, which is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform for the automatic generation of images, social media visuals, ecommerce banners and more. Furthermore, according to the job history listed on his LinkedIn profile, Yongfook is a former employee of Aviva.
In addition, Yongfook later posted a clarification on his X account in a follow-up tweet. He explained that his original post had been intended as satire. He wrote, “I have been an Apple user for more than 20 years, this is the worst UI I have seen, I hope Apple will make some changes to it.”
Bless all of you who recognized this as satire. I’ve been enjoying the puns. I’ve been an Apple user for 20+ years, this is the worst UI I’ve seen, I hope they tweak it.
To be perfectly transparent, this is overwhelming my notifications now, so I’m putting the thread on mute 🙏
— Jon Yongfook (@yongfook) June 10, 2025
To sum up, X user Jon Yongfook is not an Apple employee but rather an Apple user who posted a satirical comment on social media. The post was amplified as ‘news’ by several media outlets including Republic Bharat, NDTV Group, and News24 seemingly without any verification. These outlets falsely reported that Apple had fired the lead designer and the team behind Liquid Glass UI.
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