Toward Long‐Lasting Slippery Surfaces for Condensation and Icephobicity: From Lubricant‐Infused to Liquid‐Like Surfaces

ABSTRACT Slippery surfaces that minimize contact line pinning and enable high droplet mobility have emerged as promising solutions for enhancing condensation and anti‐icing performance. Among them, lubricant‐infused surfaces (LIS) and liquid‐like surfaces (LLS) are two dominant design strategies that achieve dynamic liquid repellency via fundamentally different mechanisms. This review distills what works, why it works, and how to make it last. We clarify the distinct mechanisms: liquid–liquid interfacial transport in LIS versus tethered‐chain mobility in LLS and connect these to application‐level outcomes: stable dropwise condensation (including low‐surface‐tension fluids), low ice adhesion, and delayed frost propagation. We identify durability as the rate‐limiting barrier and clarify the primary failure pathways: lubricant loss in LIS (via cloaking, wetting‐ridge–mediated entrainment, and frost wicking) and molecular or structural degradation in LLS (including chain scission, entanglement, and interfacial heterogeneity). From these insights, we extract design rules for LIS and LLS: employing closed‐cell and hierarchical reservoirs to immobilize lubricants under shear; defining lubricant's property windows, such as viscosity and miscibility, that suppress cloaking while retaining mobility; and optimizing grafting‐density and molecular‐weight regimes to preserve LLS segmental dynamics while ensuring coverage. We further highlight emerging, application‐ready solutions, such as active and passive lubricant replenishment schemes, stimuli‐ and phase‐change–responsive systems, hybrid LIS/LLS stacks, and fluorine‐free chemistries. Finally, we outline critical future directions to ensure commercial success, focusing on overcoming economic barriers and meeting environmental regulations. Together, these insights provide a roadmap for engineering scalable, long‐lived slippery surfaces that translate interfacial physics into robust performance across next‐generation energy, water, and anti‐icing systems.