I think a lot of people confuse “gingerbread” aspects of skeumorphism like page turning, woodgrain, and a green felt playing board with plain old good interface design focused on how things work in real life, which just plain helps the user.
Speaking for myself, what I miss most from pre-iOS7 was not that the calendar looked like paper/cardboard or had page turns, but I miss that the design was about helping the user understand/use the content quickly and intuitively. In certain aspects, a control or screen used aspects of the real life counterparts we still use today, which just simply worked.
Back then the design was not focused on stubbornly implementing the interface to be as minimalist white/light grey as possible, devoid of the interface cues we took for granted like clear differentiation of what’s actionable (button) vs what’s just text. And I miss seeing lines/separators for content vs. controls, and to differentiate different parts of the content or controls (for example, at least now iOS Settings went back to colored/shaded zones that differentiate groupings of commands, instead of the minimalist just-lines-from-left-to-right-across-the-screen that made everything just blend in way too much together and it took more cognitive work at times to navigate.
And I miss seeing often-used commands out in the open instead of hidden behind the hamburger icon. Or is it under the ellipse icon? Or that gear icon? Still now 10 years after iOS7, many apps/interfaces are still too white, too stark, a little too vague.
As Jony Ive is thankfully gone, Apple keeps baby-stepping back to robust, intuitive interface design like before ~2013…interface design focused on use honed after decades of refinement, and not a hardware designer’s minimalist preferences. And if it looks similar to a real life counterpart, hey, no problem!
