Is Apple falling behind when it comes to UI/UX design?

[wakinghour]

When I was a junior level designer I often jumped on the bandwagon that Android and Microsoft were becoming the design leaders and Apple was playing it safe. After a few years, I realized this was overhyped. Apple has this sort of reserved discipline where it doesn't get carried away with trends.

Google has brilliant designers, but they miss the mark a lot because the take so many bets and impose it on the user. Material design sounds good in theory, and in some cases is a more technically precise design language, but in reality it's very clinical and the design precision doesn't carry out to actual user benefit in the real world.

Apple does make some very poor design decisions recently, namely iOS7, the music app, etc. but in general their work stands the test of time. It sounds incredibly ridiculous, but their products have this wit and charm that just make things a delight to use. Their stuff feels more like something made for ordinary people and not tech nerds.

Technology is all about the latest, flashiest thing. Design is more disciplined than that. You have to serve millions of people, and your brand and usability has to be on point year after year. You have to avoid being prettiest girl in high school who becomes a nobody in college.

 

[Mrbobb]

When Jonny Ive said he liked Microsoft FLAT, that told me they lost it.

Small progress, I notice on IOS11 they brought back the cellular bars instead of the 9.x silly circles... sheeese, sometimes, even "vaunted" Apple engineers go for new instead of keep what already work perfectly fine.

Rumor has it IOS12(?) brings back 3D... where I shall throw a party and adieu ugly FLAT.

Whatever happened to Jobs' NO MORE THAN 3 CLICKS TO YOUR MUSIC, or do anything. Gosh, getting a setting on IOS nowadays is like a maze of 10,000 tentacles. I miss Jobs.

 

[charlituna]

These kind of threads usually end up with people claiming lack of UI/UX design just because they want something to look different. Change for the sake of change. I mean look at Google, they cannot even stick with one set of theme for Android settings page (going from dark theme, white theme, monotone, and then colored icons, all just to show it’s different on every new Android version). Change for the sake of change.

personally I don't care about the design appearance. it's the function that I care about. we could still be back on the old iOS 6 design look as long as it works. what I want to see are things like expanding iPad folders to more of the screen cause I just don't understand why its not. plus functional tweaks like stickers being searchable in the store and usable by all apps, not this set for iMessages and that set for Facebook and those for snapchat. same with photo filters. and then how about not having to download a whole app for keyboards, ad blockers, having plug ins for more apps like photos, iMovie etc. and while we have plug in support how about universally usable fonts which can be downloaded without an app. things like this are what I want. not glassy shiny icons etc

 

[pika2000]

personally I don't care about the design appearance. it's the function that I care about. we could still be back on the old iOS 6 design look as long as it works. what I want to see are things like expanding iPad folders to more of the screen cause I just don't understand why its not. plus functional tweaks like stickers being searchable in the store and usable by all apps, not this set for iMessages and that set for Facebook and those for snapchat. same with photo filters. and then how about not having to download a whole app for keyboards, ad blockers, having plug ins for more apps like photos, iMovie etc. and while we have plug in support how about universally usable fonts which can be downloaded without an app. things like this are what I want. not glassy shiny icons etc

Many of the things you mentioned depends on the app developers. Eg. plug-ins for photos. Apple provided the mechanism/API. It's up to the devs to adopt it or not.

 

[Princejb134]

I love the ios ui. Android ui with material design have always felt cheap to me. And windows was always a mess so is good their changing it.
The one thing that still bothers me is the music app design, the old design was more beautiful and had better functuality to me.