Yesterday Apple revealed iOS7 to the world, and it’s looking a lot sexier than some were expecting. It’s minimalistic, understated and very modern looking, and it’s probably going to cause some division amongst the design community as a whole. Certainly iOS has been due for an upgrade, but there are those who think that moving away from Skeumorphism isn’t the way to do it. After all, it’s that tying the digital with the real that has let Apple capture a customer base full of people who aren’t tech savvy. They want technology that looks good, is easy to use and “just works”, with none of the mess or fuss that comes with more open and complex OS like Android.
This focus on the end user is why Apple has done so well across such a broad spectrum of customer bases. Do they risk alienating this customer base by not only upgrading the features of iOS 7, but also the entire look and feel of it?
By looking at the redesign, at Kumulos we’re saying a tentative no.
After all, iOS 7 isn’t being released into a market who’s never seen anything like it before. Even customers who are otherwise uninterested or uninitiated in the rest of the computing world will have used iOS for a while. They’ve watched the OS grow up and mature and will be more capable of adapting to the changes than they would have had Apple done this upgrade say, a year or two into iOS’s lifetime.
The main question here won’t be customers working with iOS 7, it will be developers.
With a new design comes new design principles for making apps inside the new OS, and that means iOS developers are going to have to change their way of thinking. Apps that followed in Apple’s Skeumorphic tendancies will now likely look out of date and tacky by the more modern and stripped down v.7. This is likely to mean a slew of updates to older apps, and a fairly rapid change in the way newer apps are designed.
But will it be the devs following Apple, or is Apple following the devs? There had been an increasing trend of app developers going for very flat designs with solid colours and large, easy to distinguish buttons well before iOS 7. It could be that Apple has been paying close attention to the emerging styles in app development and has adjusted to match. Of course Ive is also a vocal proponent of flat design over skeumorphism and as he’s in charge now, we’ll likely be seeing a lot more of it in the near future.
What does iOS 7 mean for app developers, at least in terms of design?
Keep it simple, keep it flat, keep it colourful, keep it easy to use.
From what we’ve seen, you won’t go far wrong if you follow those tenants.
