Is Apple Facing A Designer And Developer Revolt Over iOS 7?

MacWorld Conference & Expo 2007 - San Francisco Steven P. Jobs present Apple's phone : the iPhone (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

iOS 7 is one of the biggest changes for the iPhone and iPad since…. the iPhone, a stunning new interface according to Apple AAPL -2.65% CEO, Tim Cook. It’s the first OS to be influenced by design guru Jony Ive. It has plenty going for it. But there is a strong and impassioned chorus of disapproval from designers and developers. Could it damage Apple’s fortunes in the competitive Q3/Q4 market?

There is no single problem behind the disquiet. Instead, designers especially point to a collection of issues that they believe will make the iPhone and iPad less usable if the design changes proposed by Ive go ahead in their present form.

Having said that, there are also developers who see iOS 7 as an exciting, new innovation platform (this is the third in a short series of posts taking a deeper dive into iOS 7 and key perspectives on it. You can see one post on iOS 7 and Android here, and one on iOS 7 as an innovation platform here).

The design drawbacks of iOS 7 seem to come down to four main problems, all focused on Ive’s minimalist, white space design language:

Inconsistency in Apple’s approach (some of their own apps still have real -world textures and are neither flat nor minimalist);  the huge amount of white space, when useful information could be inserted, so a sense that minimalism is a religion here rather than a tool for communicating well; on top of that the sense that there are no options left as all three mobile platforms are now flat; and finally the drive towards more white space and less clutter makes it difficult to see which parts of a screen are meant to be tapped for some kind of link or execution.

And as we are talking about Apple the debate is passionate. Forbes reader Dominique Peretti left this comment on Re:Thinking Innovation:

I’m one of those developers who are very worried about is going on at Apple. Steve Jobs is dead. Scott Forstall was fired. Designers like Mike Matas are gone. How could iOS continue to be iOS ? I thought Cook and Ive would be faithful to Jobs’ well known opinions on design and user interface. But iOS7 looks exactly like what Jobs used to hate. Jobs used to refer to Apple’s DNA. But it was not Apple’s DNA, it was his, and the new executives want obviously iOS to use theirs.

It’s not just those ugly icons. Those reveal a degree of amateurism which we didn’t know Apple could produce (imagine this for a sec in the Jobs era !), which is worrisome, but I’m sure they will be fixed by the time of the final release. I’m more concerned with the overuse of white in the navigation, the new borderless buttons which make any application looks like an un-styled, HTML mock-up. The meaningless, ugly outlined icons (those won’t change).

Daniel pointed out a couple of tumblr sites that are aggregating designer and developer disapproval. They are a good jumping off point for the online debate. One features designers, the other developers.

Here’s a comment left two days ago, on the latter, that goes to the heart of developer concerns:

Worst iOS ever… entirely impossible to create a unique UI without creating your own controls all over the place. Everything is re-done, breaking just about everything in every app. Moving apps to new UI is going to be a nightmare for devs.

It’s not all gloom. Designer Tim Green has also been scathing about iOS 7 yet has found iOS 7 better than he expected, according to his blog:

I’ve been working on redesigning the app I work on in an iOS 7 style in my spare time to see how it would work and it pained me to admit that it actually looked pretty good.

Tim already observed before WWDC (in May, in fact) that key apps were being redesigned in a flatter, more 3D like way (Google and Facebook for example). These are key players and would have had some forewarning from Apple of the changes in store. Yahoo’s Weather app already apples the new style and has been acclaimed.

Some of the criticism is aimed at Apple’s corporate mindset:

The biggest symbol of the problem is the Apple logo on the front of the device. A symbol which has come to be interpreted as “Aesthetic Innovation at the cost of extensibility, open/common standards, and basic function- until we absolutely HAVE to improve performance” Future versions iOS could be great if Apple were no longer in charge of it. Ask any jailbreaker.

Quora recently posted an interesting take on the changes – that this is, in fact, a move towards designs that enable both voice and touch commands. And I quoted Swedish AI expert Lars Hand, here, saying that the design is a step into better 3D-like and contextual computing.

Of course, if you are a start up then to push things into the public early, take criticism on the chin and then improve, is really the new product management. It is a key part of innovation and market acceptance.

Larger companies are not being given a whole lot of room for maneuver on this. Think back to last week and the crowing reaction to Microsoft’s reversal on Xbox One. Earlier in the year, Apple got it in the neck from critics over its Maps release. Apple, especially, are expected to get product right straight out of the box.

But maybe not. Maybe this dialogue is the most useful way for Apple to learn about the needs of its key communities. For the dialogue to improve Apple needs to let its communities know that it is more open to persuasion. Better still it would explain the deigns in the context of its 2014 product plans, so its community is not left second-guessing the full motivation behind the redesign. As we move towards the key Fall and 

Christmas markets Apple needs to ask itself why it might not want all of its developers and designers on board. To be effective this Fall they need the scale of advocacy they had two years ago. Time to open up?