Snippet: iOS 7 Squandered a Year of Third-Party Development on Superficial Changes ☇

Jared Sinclair:

With that out of the way, allow me to say that I’m frustrated with the current state of affairs on iOS. It’s been almost a year since version 7.0 was announced, yet as a developer I feel like a year’s worth of work has brought about only superficial changes to the apps I work on and the apps I use.

I don’t disagree with most of his analysis, especially in that iOS 7, although certainly feeling normal now, does not really work differently than iOS 6 did a year ago. Furthermore, it created a jarring environment where some apps still have not been updated, and the ones that do work pretty much the same as their predecessors. Blame that on lazy developers, but sadly the users suffer. I will say that from a developer standpoint, iOS 7 does bring a lot of under-the-hood changes, and obviously included some innovations for newer hardware. Still, part of me always wonders how and what things would’ve been like if Apple kept iOS 6’s design language with iOS 7’s improvements.

Almost a year on, I mostly enjoy iOS 7’s aesthetics and really appreciate some of the new features, but I also wonder if this move to everything-flat has just made Apple feel more in line with its competitors, and some personality was lost in the process.