Sir Jonathan “Jony” Ive has, in one fell swoop, stolen my heart, or at least his design for iOS 7 has. Apparently I am not the only one. Across the nation, universities’ campus Wi-Fi access has slowed down or even crashed completely, allegedly because so many people were downloading iOS 7. Since Android launched Jelly Bean 4.3 in July, a Google analysis reported that less than 0.01 percent of Android devices have been updated. Even Jelly Bean 4.2, which came out in 2012, is only on 8.5 percent of Android devices.
Within 24 hours, TechCrunch reported, iOS 7 may already be on up to 35 percent of compatible devices, which includes both certain iPhones and iPads. What made this update so popular, though? Since the iPhone’s release in 2007, the operating system design has seen many different changes, but none of those changes have been as radically different as iOS 7, at least aesthetically. Until last October, Scott Forstall worked as one of the major heads behind iOS, but when he resigned from his position as senior vice president of iOS, his role was split up into many different parts, with Ive taking the reins of Human Interface design. Ive’s dislike of “skeuomorphism,” design that mimics real-life textures and visual cues, has been talked about since before the initial reveal of iOS 7 earlier this year.
His design has reaffirmed that skeuomorphism may be a thing of the past. No longer does the iPhone have drop shadows to create the illusion of depth. The Notes app no longer looks like a note pad. The graphics are “flatter” and more colorful. More than just a complete revamp of the graphics, though, iOS 7 comes packed with features users have been requesting for ages. Like the drag-down Notification Center introduced with iOS 5, users can now drag up from the bottom of the screen to reveal the Control Center, with one-click access to turn on or off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, camera flash and more.
Another highly- desired feature new to iOS 7 is the ability to block numbers from contacting your phone. The update also includes iTunes radio, which some have supported as a possible Pandora competitor, and finally allows users to view the time stamps on all sent and received text messages. As far as performance changes go, Ars Technica reported last week that while applications do open a little bit slower in iOS 7, which may be due to animations, iOS 7 does seem to improve speed when browsing the web in Safari.
Ultimately, iOS 7 marks several major changes – changes in the design and development team and many, many changes to the way iOS user interface actually looks and behaves. At this point, it seems to be very love-it-or-hate-it with users, but extremely popular nonetheless.
