Every time Apple redesigns their software, specifically iOS, the total design industry landscape changes. Basically, everyone follows them.

This phenomenon actually makes quite a lot of sense. What’s confusing, though, is that Apple typically isn’t the primary to create new design patterns or usability trends, and Apple isn’t necessarily the main capable leader with regards to software design.

They are, however, leaders in lots of others ways, and their software design is healthier than most. That’s exactly why they set trends.

Image via Songquan Deng / Shutterstock

It Started With Me

I see this happen to me each time a major shift happens in iOS. It started at the day the iPhone was released in 2007. i used to be blown away by the device, the design, the usability, the touch screen, the gestures… it was all so new, so cool, and very unexpected.

I remember immediately applying the foundations in their gestures and design patterns to my very own trade, which was and is designing websites and web applications. i used to be literally so inspired, and that i still believe that that day changed history and shaped every single day that came after it. The style that everybody thought of design and user interactions was totally turned the other way up.

Subsequent releases of recent iOS versions and contours evoked an analogous reaction. plenty of this has to do with Apple basing its design decisions on deep human principles, smart thinking and research. That implies that after you get it (you notice it after Apple’s done it), you already know that there are a wide variety of how to use Apple’s thinking and usefulness on your own projects and ways of fascinated about projects and users.

I Wasn’t Alone

Soon i realized that others were taking the cue to boot. When iOS first started innovating, it was long before responsive website design. If truth be told, it was largely the primary time that full, beautiful websites were viewable on cell phones. It is sensible, then, that once everyone started creating mobile versions in their websites, the plain inspiration was Apple’s native apps.

It could be hard to keep in mind, however the original native apps, before the App Store existed, were nowhere near what they’re today. Still, they were like nothing anyone had seen previously.

So mobile websites, at the beginning of the “true” mobile web, looked so much like Apple’s iOS apps. Frameworks started emerging, like jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch, that featured simple “views” with back buttons within the upper left, nav bars around the bottom, bouncy scrolls and more. Forget loading new pages. We wanted sliding and flipping transitions between views without a load time.

Briefly, and after Android was out, there has been a push for “non Apple” mobile UIs, which translated basically to a platform agnostic, mobile-web-specific UI language. Even that looked and functioned plenty like Apple.

Then Came the App Store

Image by Christophe Tauziet

Soon Apple unfolded their App Store and created this complete new subset of the technology/development/design industry where anyone could create their very own mobile apps. Here it really made sense to duplicate Apple’s interfaces and design styles, and it is probably what set the tone for the future years.

Now, designers and UX people had good reason to base their decisions off of the functions that users were already used to. That’s usability 101. Especially because before the iPhone, there have been no pre-existing user patterns for touch-based mobile apps.

The issue, in order to call it that, is that we now have an entire slew of various use cases and value patterns from all different mobile operating systems, mobile and responsive websites, and mobile applications. It sort of feels, though, that everybody still desires to follow Apple.

I guess it’s safe…

The Flat Design Example

Recently, essentially the mostsome of the most relevant example of the way we’re all still being led by Apple is de facto flat design.

Apple failed to invent flat design, and in reality, that you need to argue that they don’t even practice true flat design. (i do know there’s no formal definition of flat design to tell us they don’t… but they don’t.)

Image by Leo Drapeau

Regardless of its popularity pre-iOS 7, all of the sudden, with the discharge of iOS 7, everything on the earth went flat.

I don’t mean that the Facebook, Instagram and Twitter apps updated their designs to compare the hot iOS 7 flat interface and best practices. That did happen, though.

I mean that websites became flatter to check their mobile app companions. In numerous cases, Android apps got the flat treatment besides. Taking things a step further, some very large companies even updated their logos! Yahoo, Google and Bing all released new, flatter logos right round the time Apple updated to iOS 7.

The proven fact that Apple wasn’t nearly the primary company to implement flat design helps to strengthen my point. Flat design was extremely popular amongst designers and stylish tech or design-focused companies. It was written about, debated and defined. Nonetheless it took Apple to let everyone know that “OK, it’s safe to do that now. We did it.”

Back to Me

The thing is, even in fact these years, i used to be insanely inspired by watching the Apple keynote where iOS 7 was revealed. Especially after they showed the recent photos app.

And it’s crazy, because I dislike the hot design of the “select” inputs, I dislike how the back arrow interacts with its label, and that i dislike another minor choices.

But i like how they push our whole industry forward. i admire how they thought “outside the box” and threw all previous assumptions out the window. i admire how Jonny Ive was capable of take his genius and spill it into the software side of the product.

For now, and doubtless for ages into the long run, I and everybody else will continue to repeat Apple, whether consciously or subconsciously, through Apple directly or through another individual who copied Apple originally. We’ll continue to have “aha” moments when Apple rethinks a standard user interface element. For better or worse, we’ll continue to base our aesthetic decisions on Apple’s cellphone interface.

And, really, that’s not this type of bad thing.

Here’s another articles that you’ll definitely find useful.

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