Editorial: Apple's iOS 7 needs exclusive, distinctive features, not just a flat UI

Posted:
in iPhone edited January 2014
There's intense interest blooming around reports that Apple plans to revamp the look of iOS 7 with a flatter appearance. But there's more reason to believe that Apple is - or should be - focusing on features, not a radical new appearance.

iOS 6

Is iOS 6 boring?


Pundits like to say that iOS 6 is "boring," pointing out that little has changed in the iPhone's general appearance since it arrived in 2007. This is essentially true; iOS on both the iPhone and iPad continues to serve as a rather plain springboard for apps, rather than lots of chrome that attracts undue attention to itself.

Apple's main image depicting iOS 6 (above), apart from sporting new apps and running on new hardware, is nearly identical to the original appearance of Apple's mobile OS from 2007.

This tends to make any adornment at all (such as the use of leather accents, ragged paper skeumorphism and Game Center's craps table background) a subject of attention, even though these accents are simply a minor graphic embellishment, not a radical shift in the user experience.

Over the past six years, Apple has added a series of UI-extending features which helped to define each annual release via functionality without significantly altering the overall appearance of iOS, from 2.0's App Store to 3.0's fast app-switching "multitasking" to 4.0's Spotlight search and tethering to 5.0's Notification Center and Siri and 6.0's Passbook, Maps and social integration for Facebook and Twitter.

Makeup your mindshare

In contrast, Apple's competitors have all focused on completely revamping their mobile user interfaces, in large measure because iOS so clearly leaped ahead of the market at its launch.

Since 2007, Microsoft radically reinvented its entire user experience of Windows Mobile multiple times, first using Vista as a template (WiMo 6.5, below) and then with the Zune's tile based interface, resulting in Windows Phone, quite disastrously. Microsoft went from having 12 percent of the smartphone market to its current single digit fraction.

Windows Mobile 6.5


In 2009, Palm created the webOS, fully rethinking its dated, classic Palm OS. It did not recover.



Nokia tried to rebuild Symbian before abandoning it, and Blackberry revamped its OS with a new appearance a couple of times as it continued to hemorrhage market relevance.

In 2009, Google's Android was so diverse that phones from different vendors didn't offer much clue of being the same platform (as noted at the time, below).

Android UIs


In 2011, Google tried to give Android a fresh 3D appearance called Holo (shown below), first targeting a new crop of tablets with it in Android Honeycomb 3.0.

Android 3.0 Honeycomb more like Tablet PC than iPad


The embarrassing boondoggle of Honeycomb tablets ended up getting toned down for the smartphone-centric release of Android 4.0, but even today, more than two years later, the majority of all Android devices still run outdated software that predates the entire Holo experiment. In fact, even among the Android devices that regularly buy from Google Play, 44 percent still run a version of the software prior to Android 3.0.

On top of this, much of the installed base of the Android "platform" not only looks disparate, but in many cases it is intentionally differentiated, such as is the case with Amazon's Kindle Fire and low end phones targeting China and developing countries, which don't use Play at all.

These Android devices often have as much appearance and functionality in common with Apple via borrowing from the WebKit project as they do with Google for incorporating code from Android, which is to say: very little at all.These Android devices often have as much appearance and functionality in common with Apple via borrowing from the WebKit project as they do with Google for incorporating code from Android, which is to say: very little at all.

It's as if Apple entered a beauty pageant during the talent competition and all the other contestants freaked out and responded by layering on gaudy makeup the way Paula Deen uses Crisco. And the judges are now so bored with Apple winning every year that they now have to play the Emperor's New Clothes in describing the series of wildly new and unfamiliar user interfaces as "fresh" and "exciting," the way Car and Driver never describes the wildly new placement of a car's steering wheel and gas pedal because car makers don't ever experiment with such things just to get attention for their failing products that aren't selling or are struggling to compete solely on price.

In any event, given the side effects of these mobile makeovers, which ranged from disastrously terrible to simply irrelevant, it doesn't seem like Apple's boring success over the past six years is really all that bad of a thing.

This all happened before

Consider too the history of the desktop user environment. The overall appearance of Apple's original Macintosh didn't really make any substantial changes between 1984 and 1991. Even at that point, Apple's new System 7 was mainly made to support new color capabilities rather than radically rethink the Mac's graphical computing environment.

Mac System 7


The Mac platform then continued onward with few changes for another decade through Mac OS 9 (above) before Apple launched its first real revamping of the user interface with Mac OS X 10.0. And again, that was again spurred by advancing technology; in Aqua's case, it was a new graphics compositing engine that supported features such as real time translucency and shadows.

But rather than being a whole new exciting UI, Aqua was really a Macintoshification of NeXT, Steve Jobs' computing platform that grew up in the shadow of Apple in the late 80s (below). The new Mac OS X was really a different underlying operating system that had been modified from its original appearance to look more like the Mac, rather than being an unfamiliar, radical rethinking of the Mac platform.



Over the next decade, Apple essentially toned down the original Aqua interface in each new release (shown below), rather than trying to radically revamp it over and over again. And in hindsight, this conservative maintenance of familiarity has worked in Apple's favor.

Aqua


Now compare that to Microsoft, which after launching Windows 95 also successfully kept things reliably boring for the next ten years. Just like Apple (and largely patterned after the Macintosh, as shown below), Microsoft only added relatively minor changes in how Windows looked and worked until 2006's Windows Vista, which suddenly made far more significant changes in both appearance and behavior.



Vista had multiple reasons for failing to be successful, but its radically new and unfamiliar appearance sure didn't seem to help. Microsoft then recovered somewhat by dialing back the gloss of Vista in Windows 7, only to layer on an even more disruptive layer of unfamiliar user experience with Windows 8.

At this point, it's hard to argue that the appearance-centric strategy behind Windows 8 was anything but a huge failure.

This makes it curious why anyone might wonder out loud why Apple hasn't completely revamped the user interface of iOS over the past few years.

Update looks, but work on features

Rather than it being critically important for Apple to remake iOS into something that impresses the reviewers of products, it's really only necessary for the company to clean things up a bit, a continuation of the efforts it has made on both iOS and Mac OS X over the past decade.

Apple has in particular unified the look of Mac and iOS devices, sharing features between them and clearing out concepts that never really took off or are now dated looking or obsolete (like the Brushed Metal appearance on OS X).

We'll very likely see a refreshed overall appearance for OS X and iOS at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference next month, but don't expect a radical rethinking of the user interface and behaviors.

That's because Apple now has more in common with Microsoft in 2000; it has more customers to lose with confusing shifts like Vista than it has to potentially gain by trying to attract fad-seeking smartphone reviewers who were entertained by webOS and titillated by learning from scratch to use a Windows Phone.

Instead of a radical user interface shift, Apple appears more likely to simply excise the more egregious bits of fluff that characterized Scott Forstall's management of iOS (the pinnacle, perhaps, being Game Center, below) and replace these with the more subtle lines favored by the company's head of industrial design, Jonathan Ive.

Game Center


Blogger Joshua Merrill has suggested that Apple's new WWDC logo (below) likely represents a stack of colored app icons, where each color represents a particular app. Apple already uses colors to denote function, coding information apps (like Safari, Mail and iWork apps) in blue, telephony and messaging apps in green and utilitarian apps like Settings in grey, a practice that originated on the Mac OS. At WWDC, this concept may be carried ahead even further.

WWDC


But beyond a focused face lift, what iOS really needs is exclusive features that make the iPhone and iPad more useful everyday. In large part, Apple has left this task to third party app developers, but Apple has some core apps that it needs to shore up with modern functionally.

iOS apps that need attention

Apple has been incrementally adding innovative "enabling technologies" that are used throughout iOS' core apps, ranging from facial recognition and HDR in the Camera app (and iPhoto) to geolocation and gyroscope features that show up all over the place.

Oddly enough however, Apple has yet added any sort of Optical Character Recognition features for digitally reading and importing text seen by the camera or sensed on a web page or within other graphics.Why can't an Internet-connected app look up zip or postal code information for you?

This is why Contacts can't import data from a business card via the camera. In fact, of all the iOS apps, Contacts is particularly barren in functionality. Why can't an Internet-connected app look up zip or postal code information for you? And particularly grievous: why hasn't Apple wrung more value out of one of the very few patents its has gotten any real traction out of, Apple Data Detectors?

Manually copying and pasting address information, names, photos and other information from a web page or email into Contacts should be unnecessary. And given that iOS' copy/paste loves to copy an entire region from a web page, Contacts should be smart enough to import a rough selection and offer to magically break it all up into address, phone and other Contact fields.

Like Contacts, Notes also got basic iCloud integration. But the app remains an incredibly bare bones text affair. Certainly 2013's iOS 7 should be able to support a real Notes app that imports photos, allows users to doodle, insert videos or maps, and then keep all these scrapbook bits synched across devices with iCloud.

Notes could also serve as a simple way to compose and then share thoughts and images with social networks, from Facebook and Instagram to Twitter and Flickr.

Another example of an app that's been incrementally enhanced but could use a lot more basic functionality is Messages. Given that Apple controls the experience of SMS, iMessage, FaceTime, Phone voicemails and Mail it would make sense to integrate these better so you could rapidly peruse all the various messages a particular contact has sent your way.

Apple could also expand support for automatically configuring Facebook messaging, given that it is based on the same open XMPP technology as the old iChat. And of course, Apple could also add stronger social network integration with other services, including those it supports on OS X such as Vimeo and Flickr.

There's also strong potential for Apple to create new app features without interfering too much with third parties. While iMovie lets you edit actual movies, Apple could release a scaled down social sharing app for making sharable videos along the lines of Vine, perhaps even integrating this into Photos.

Offer the same sort of Faces and Places tagging, and support basic editing features to make easy to create, easy to share video experiences you could iMessage to your friends, complete with view-expiring features like Snapchat. And stop leaving user experience dead-ends in iOS, such as where you can see your photos within Camera, but to do anything with them you need to exit and enter the Photos app. This is ridiculous.

Another core feature Apple is (more) likely to add to iOS is support for ad-hoc sharing, similar to AirDrop on the Mac desktop. Being able to send photos, locations, messages, and documents like provisioning profiles between devices or to a desktop via iCloud (if necessary) without emailing them would be handy.

Of course, Apple has to take care not to steamroll its third party developers. There's a delicate balance between first and third party development, complicated by the fact that many of the things Apple is working toward are also identified independently by third parties as commercial opportunities.

However, whenever Apple has spearheaded its own software development it has delivered important stickiness for its platforms, which can be observed well back into the 1980s from Lisa Office to AppleWorks and in the modern era with iTunes, iWorks, iLife and Pro Apps.

Software Sells Systems

In 1979, John Couch was in charge of all software at Apple Computer. He commissioned this poster to emphasize the importance of software in selling hardware.


And conversely, whenever Apple has relied entirely upon third parties to add value to its platforms, it's gotten the treatment of Microsoft, Adobe and Google.

So if anyone needs something to worry about with the future of iOS, it's not its "boring" appearance but rather the scope and quality of the features and functionality it offers that its competitors currently don't (or already do).
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 257
    hunabkuhunabku Posts: 55member
    Here here. iOS needs deep down changes. The best thing they could do is develop killer APIs and then showcase them in their core apps. They could create new APIs for inter-application communication and then demonstrate them by consolidating messaging, email, etc per contact - as mentioned in this article. They could also finally provide a SIRI api, BOOST its performance and then integrate it more tightly in more apps. Developers of course would lap this stuff up.
  • Reply 2 of 257
    tao jonestao jones Posts: 16member
    they are talking about loosing the fake leather from the address book and calendar the rest of the interface is flat enough trust mr Ives to do something elegant and simple as far as those comparrisons go if apple had not designed the i-phone interface first the rest would be figguring out how to add a 3rd hinge to the ripped off razor phone design
  • Reply 3 of 257
    charlitunacharlituna Posts: 7,217member
    1. Refreshing the UI doesn't mean they are looking at nothing else

    2. Don't confuse what you wish they would do with what they might/will.
  • Reply 4 of 257
    If all Apple gave us was faster hardware, running a more stable, faster version of iOS, with much-needed updates to the core apps, and simply continued to improve Maps and Siri, I'd be happy as a clam.

    Apple spoiled the media by continuously hitting the ball out of the park for several years and now anything less, no matter how factually successful, will look like failure to them. I'd say who cares what they think, but what they think could hurt Apple no matter the facts.
  • Reply 5 of 257
    joshuarayerjoshuarayer Posts: 151member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by AppleInsider View Post





    Over the past six years, Apple has added a series of UI-extending features which helped to define each annual release via functionality without significantly altering the overall appearance of iOS, from 2.0's App Store to 3.0's fast app-switching "multitasking" to 4.0's Spotlight search and tethering to 5.0's Notification Center and Siri and 6.0's Passbook, Maps and social integration for Facebook and Twitter.


     


    Spotlight was introduced in iOS 3.0 and multitasking was introduced in iOS 4.0. You got it backwards.

  • Reply 6 of 257
    mj1970mj1970 Posts: 9,002member
    I'm trying to figure out why some think this seems to be an either/or proposition.

    Granted, much attention has been given to rumors of Jony Ive's plans and direction for the visual aspects of iOS. But none of that suggests any lack of attention to other iOS concerns. In fact, it may well be an activity that is prompting deeper, broader and more functional and architectural changes.

    I've seen much speculation that appears to stem from idea that UI is all and only about the visual. It is not and, in fact, many things that someone like Jony Ive may want to see happen in the UI could require deeper changes to the OS architecture and frameworks to achieve.
  • Reply 7 of 257
    mdriftmeyermdriftmeyer Posts: 7,503member
    The entire NeXT Services that are part of OS X and iOS but not remotely as well extended and exposed as it is in NeXTSTEP/Openstep should be available in iOS 7 and OS X 10.9.

    Within DropBox on either platform should be a much richer and deeper public api that allows for a much richer experience of services. On iOS it has to be as unobtrusive as possible. In OS X it must be much more clearly exposed and leveraged across OS X and Apple must show within its own app suites how they are leveraging it to its fullest.

    Obviously, the Kernel will be different in both. The print system will be more robust. The networking system will be more secure, robust and extended to cover more standards. The Graphics Core will be a big jump. The Compiler Tools will have a huge jump after the first week of June.

    The encryptions standards will be expanded. The Filesystem support will have its usual improvements to more file systems and possibly new updates to HFS that should be replaced by the time OS XI arrives.

    OpenGL4.x/OpenCL1.2 (OpenCL 2.0 being published this August by the working body housed at Khronos.org, along with OpenGL 5.0).

    There is a lot of change coming. Apple needs to show how it not only is making the foundation robust but develop a best practices tier even more visible than it already does for people to best leverage it. All the Cocoa Frameworks will be updated.
  • Reply 8 of 257
    saareksaarek Posts: 1,520member
    I second the need to fix the camera dead end issue. Don't know how it ever got out the door like that.
  • Reply 9 of 257
    sflocalsflocal Posts: 6,092member


    iOS being "stale" is just those ADHD-afflicted tech-heads and whiners that need a visual-change every 10 minutes.  Nothing can keep their interest or attention for any decent amount of time.



    iOS is efficient, stable, and polished, and gets the job done.  Apple will tweak, address, and resolve issues like they're always good at doing.  I'm happy with the progress they have made, and trust that they will (usually) do the right thing when that time arrives.



    These vocal boredom-folks can go to Android and tweak to their hearts' content.  

  • Reply 10 of 257
    solipsismxsolipsismx Posts: 19,566member
    OpenGL4.x/OpenCL1.2 (OpenCL 2.0 being published this August by the working body housed at Khronos.org, along with OpenGL 5.0).

    Assuming this doesn't launch until September with the next iPhone is it possible for OpenCL 2.0 to be implemented by the time it's released?
  • Reply 11 of 257
    Who know, will be the same Flat UI how is here - http://designmodo.com/flat-free/ ? Or maybe something pseudo flat?
  • Reply 12 of 257
    rogifanrogifan Posts: 10,669member
    charlituna wrote: »
    1. Refreshing the UI doesn't mean they are looking at nothing else

    2. Don't confuse what you wish they would do with what they might/will.
    So far all that's been leaked is what Ive is working on. We don't know what Federighi has been doing though one would assume he hasn't been twiddling his thumbs the past 6 months.

    6 years is a long time to go without really changing the look and feel of the OS (or changing it for the worse). iOS really looks a mess now because certain things have been changed or toned down but others are the same so there's little consistency. I get the feeling Ive has wanted to change things for a long time. And a contributor to Forbes intimated that, claiming rumors are Ive has hated iOS for quite a while (and left the impression Ive might have been talking smack about it behind Forstall's back).

    I think people are making a mistake if they think all Ive is doing is giving iOS a fresh coat of paint. The 9to5Mac story mentioned there would be changes to the lock screen and notification center as well as possibly quick access to toggles for Bluetooth, wifi, etc. And the Bloomberg piece claimed Ive was looking in to overhauling the mail app but might not make it in in time for iOS 7. Those things aren't window dressing to me.
  • Reply 13 of 257
    rogifanrogifan Posts: 10,669member
    sflocal wrote: »
    iOS being "stale" is just those ADHD-afflicted tech-heads and whiners that need a visual-change every 10 minutes.  Nothing can keep their interest or attention for any decent amount of time.


    iOS is efficient, stable, and polished, and gets the job done.  Apple will tweak, address, and resolve issues like they're always good at doing.  I'm happy with the progress they have made, and trust that they will (usually) do the right thing when that time arrives.


    These vocal boredom-folks can go to Android and tweak to their hearts' content.  

    There's lots of iOS that is not polished. Certain things are just down right cartoonish and ugly. Maybe they made sense in 2007 but in 2013 you can stop patronizing people as ones who use smartphones and tablets probably know what they're doing, or if they don't learn quick.
  • Reply 14 of 257
    tbelltbell Posts: 3,146member


    It is silly to think Apple is not going to keep up with its established trend of announcing over 200 new features with iOS7. Further, people should know the same people who work on the design of the iOS are not generally the same people who add features. The reality is there are different teams working on creating GUI elements such as graphic icons, and programming features. The current OS often times lacks a consistent design theme. The interface for Quicktime is mostly black and white. It, however, looks great. I wonder why OSX didn't borrow the same look. 


     


    Snow Leopard was one of the best releases of OSX ever, yet it was mostly a clean up the OS release and only made modest tweaks.


     


    Windows Vista stank not because of interface changes, but because it took forever to release and when it was released it was riddled with bugs because it was rushed. The OS itself had a lot of nice design refinements, such as the improved task bar. 

  • Reply 15 of 257


    Where's all this design and feature talk coming from?  Is Apple talking about this or is this just the editor's opinion?  Has Apple finally run out of company's to sue and they're now looking for a Plan B?

  • Reply 16 of 257
    tbelltbell Posts: 3,146member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Rogifan View Post





    So far all that's been leaked is what Ive is working on. We don't know what Federighi has been doing though one would assume he hasn't been twiddling his thumbs the past 6 months.



    6 years is a long time to go without really changing the look and feel of the OS (or changing it for the worse). iOS really looks a mess now because certain things have been changed or toned down but others are the same so there's little consistency. I get the feeling Ive has wanted to change things for a long time. And a contributor to Forbes intimated that, claiming rumors are Ive has hated iOS for quite a while (and left the impression Ive might have been talking smack about it behind Forstall's back).



    I think people are making a mistake if they think all Ive is doing is giving iOS a fresh coat of paint. The 9to5Mac story mentioned there would be changes to the lock screen and notification center as well as possibly quick access to toggles for Bluetooth, wifi, etc. And the Bloomberg piece claimed Ive was looking in to overhauling the mail app but might not make it in in time for iOS 7. Those things aren't window dressing to me.


     


     


    Moreover, Apple doesn't need to hold a developers conference if there aren't APIs and features being added. Developers don't need to pay money to look at new icons. There will be new features. 

  • Reply 17 of 257
    solipsismxsolipsismx Posts: 19,566member
    Where's all this design and feature talk coming from?  Is Apple talking about this or is this just the editor's opinion?  Has Apple finally run out of company's to sue and they're now looking for a Plan B?

    editorial |?edi?tôr??l|
    noun
    - a newspaper article written by or on behalf of an editor that gives an opinion on a topical issue.
  • Reply 18 of 257


    @ SolipsismX:


     


    Gotcha, so it's just the editor's opinion and Apple isn't publicly talking about adding new features or UI design elements.  Plan A it is!

     

  • Reply 19 of 257
    wakefinancewakefinance Posts: 855member


    I never thought I would see an article like this on AI.  I really hope iOS 7 has modern UI changes and adds features to make it as functional as Android.  Then I might finally be able to give my MBP an Apple companion!

  • Reply 20 of 257
    lord amhranlord amhran Posts: 902member
    Is iOS stale? I don't think so. It's elegent in its simplicity and to some simplicity=stale. I honestly don't think they need to really do anything to iOS other than perhaps the rumors of flat design that Ive's been working on. My guess is they want to purge the influence of Forestall from iOS as much as possible.
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