Foundation, Not Finish
iOS 7 launched looking like someone had poured a bucket of candy-colored paint over everything that used to feel stable. The icons, the parallax depth effect, the translucent layers, the thin fonts applied with aggressive uniformity—people had opinions. Designers especially, because designers always do, and because Jony Ive had stripped out the fake leather and green felt that his predecessor spent years installing and replaced it with something that, on first launch, gave a certain percentage of users a genuine headache.
I asked a few people what they made of it. Paul Heger, a designer, said it felt like the whole team, freed from Steve Jobs watching over their shoulders, had gone slightly feral—done everything they’d been told not to, and unfortunately nobody was there to slap their hands.
Whether that reads as criticism or observation depends on how you feel about the result. For the icon design, it’s criticism. For the system-level logic, considerably less so.
Elena Jakob, who edits the fashion platform Coultique, had bought her iPhone impulsively at 3am after a year without a phone contract, having discovered that romanticizing unavailability only lasts until you’re hunting for a payphone. She updated to iOS 7 on pure curiosity, bit her nails about it for a week, and landed somewhere between charmed and suspicious. The new interface had a toy-chest quality she couldn’t fully get behind, though she conceded that the Control Center—swipe up from the bottom for torch, wifi, brightness controls—was the kind of obvious improvement that makes you wonder why it took seven versions to arrive. She was planning to downgrade the moment Apple allowed it.
My own position was that the outrage was slightly misplaced. The animation speeds were off, some transitions felt unresolved, the icon set had inconsistencies that would embarrass a student portfolio. But the underlying spatial logic was coherent in a way the previous version never quite managed. The system operated on a Z-axis: you moved forward into apps, back out to the home screen, with a sense of layered depth that the old skeuomorphic chrome had actually obscured rather than supported. You don’t consciously register this while using it, but your spatial memory does, and navigation stops feeling like guesswork. That part worked.
What iOS 7 actually was, I thought at the time, was a foundation—the same way the original iPhone software was a foundation. It looked unfinished because it was, in the honest sense: something meant to be built on rather than admired as complete. The visual roughness would get resolved. The structural thinking underneath it was going to outlast the complaints about the Weather app icon.
Paul’s reason for staying on iPhone rather than switching to Android came down to the camera. He’d looked at the Nokia Lumia 1020—the one with the absurdly overspecified 41-megapixel sensor—but it ran Windows Phone, which put it off the table entirely. He described a theoretical Android instead: stock software, color-accurate screen, iPhone-quality optics. That phone didn’t quite exist yet, which conveniently justified staying put while leaving the door open.
I earn part of my living doing application design, which means I actually use the things I’d otherwise just argue about. I test other platforms regularly and I’ll switch when something genuinely fits better. So far it hasn’t happened—partly the ecosystem, partly honest inertia, mostly that nothing else has been better enough to make the friction worth it. iOS 7 was pointing in the right direction, and sometimes that’s enough to stay in the room a little longer and see what comes next.