Former iOS Chief Scott Forstall Surfaces After Quiet Year of Traveling and Philanthropy

[StyxMaker]

Massively better? I'm not so sure. I would not want to go back to iOS 6 though, for certain. It's because there are a lot of great features in iOS 7 that I would never want to give up. That's a good thing. But there's also a lot of features in iOS 7 that worked better in iOS 6, and there's clearly some design elements that simply don't work as well in practice as they sound in theory or perhaps look on paper. I'm not really worried about them sorting many of these things out, but given that there's been clear downgrades in certain areas, I can't sit here and say iOS 7 is massively better than iOS 6.

Another thing that I've found interesting about iOS 7, though not entirely surprising, is that almost everyone I know with an iPhone or iPad has quite a few beefs with it. What's more intriguing though is that many of the complaints I heard came from people who initially loved iOS 7 for the opposite reasons you suggested; they were excited about the changes. But as time's gone on and they've had to use it every day, frustrations have emerged.

Some frustrations stem simply from bugs, but to be clear, there's a lot of bugs, especially on the iPad. I don't think my iOS 4, 5 or 6 betas were ever as buggy as even iOS 7.0.4. I have a 5s and an iPad Air, and my Safari crashes all the time, multitasking gets stuck quite often, orientation gets stuck on the iPad all the time requiring a restart to fix, battery life has been a mess on all of the devices I've tried it on, clean installs or not, and on and on, the App Store crashes all the time, and I had to do multiple clean installs of iOS 7 on my iPhone 5s before I could even buy apps in the App Store without getting an error and a failed download. Bottom line, there are a lot of bugs that significantly affect every day use, definitely more than we've been accustomed to lately, and while they'll likely get ironed out in due time, it leads to this being the first iOS release that's felt unfinished, despite the many great new features and improvement. They sacrificed a lot for change.

But there are other problems that are cause for more concern, such as the focus on clever visuals that don't lead to improved performance or usability, and in fact in many cases they complicate and confuse users. The whole move to text instead of buttons is the first thing that I think really needs to go. It's just far too inconsistent of an indicator; some text is clickable, some isn't, and it's oftentimes not obvious. Not only that, it ends up looking sloppy in far too many cases and working poorly in others.

I could go on and on about the problems, and I could go on and on about the good stuff, but to keep things in context, it really brings home to me how frustrating it must have been dealing with Forstall at Apple. Clearly, Ive and Federighi have a lot of interesting ideas that really work, and they did a great job of cleaning up some of the problem areas in the previous iOS design language. I can't help but wonder how much better off iOS would have been or could be if Forstall was still involved and working as a team player as opposed to isolating himself among management and playing politics too hard. iOS 6 was stale, but there was a lot about it that worked great, and Forstall had a big hand in that. If he'd been more open to working with others, helping to shape some of Ive's ideas and balance them with his own valuable insight into user interface designs, I think we'd truly have an iOS 7 that is massively better than iOS 6. I half-suspect that iOS 8 will indeed be massively better than iOS 7, but I think it's going to make this year with iOS 7 feel like a long beta period.

But if iOS 8 continues to struggle with bugs and continues to feature user interface elements that simply don't work well, it's time to worry. iOS 7 is getting a lot of grace from me and countless others because it was a first run for Ive as a software design guy, it was put out on a rushed schedule, and it's trying something new. I think it's totally reasonable to give it a chance based on how much of it works great, but iOS 8 is going to have to show that they can release a stable OS, do some serious polishing work, and most importantly, completely rethink some of the areas that are simply bad ideas and prove that they're able to change and adapt.

I installed iOS7 in two iPhone 5's, an iPad 2, and an iPad 3. None of them are 'clean' installs and none of the devices are having the problems you describe.

 

[melendezest]

You know what's next? OSX looking like iOS 7. I'm sorry, but the look of iOS 6 was the Mac interface. Rich, deep, and beautiful. The icons looked better the closer you got to them. It was as if they literally took everything from the Mac and ported it to the phone (I think they actually did that).

The reverse applies with iOS 7. I don't mind the bladed interface so much, it's the plain-text crap, icons that are very Windows 95, and the ridiculous 80's neon/retro color scheme. It's the Lady Gaga of OSes, when we used to have Beethoven.

Now the two OSes are fragmented in both look and feel too. I tried Mavericks, but too many issues brought me back to ML.

But those here hating on iOS 6's look; to hate it is to hate the look of the Mac.

Skeuomorphism works, period. Using anything else is trying to reinvent the wheel. To me, it's the equivalent of going from gaming with graphics that look like Uncharted: Drake's Fortune to 1980's Pitfall.

It SUCKS. AND I CANNOT GO BACK. That is the worst part, by a lot.

C'mon jailbreakers. C'MON. 'Cause Scott ain't comin' back, and Apple's hardware and ecosystem still rocks.

 

[deluxeshredder]

You know what's next? OSX looking like iOS 7. I'm sorry, but the look of iOS 6 was the Mac interface. Rich, deep, and beautiful. The icons looked better the closer you got to them. It was as if they literally took everything from the Mac and ported it to the phone (I think they actually did that).

The reverse applies with iOS 7. I don't mind the bladed interface so much, it's the plain-text crap, icons that are very Windows 95, and the ridiculous 80's neon/retro color scheme. It's the Lady Gaga of OSes, when we used to have Beethoven.

Now the two OSes are fragmented in both look and feel too. I tried Mavericks, but too many issues brought me back to ML.

But those here hating on iOS 6's look; to hate it is to hate the look of the Mac.

Skeuomorphism works, period. Using anything else is trying to reinvent the wheel. To me, it's the equivalent of going from gaming with graphics that look like Uncharted: Drake's Fortune to 1980's Pitfall.

It SUCKS. AND I CANNOT GO BACK. That is the worst part, by a lot.

C'mon jailbreakers. C'MON. 'Cause Scott ain't comin' back, and Apple's hardware and ecosystem still rocks.

Couldn't agree more with you, but it is also worth mentioning that this is Apple's first bad GUI design in 30(!!!) years.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

Maybe a large poll conducted somewhere that shows most iOS users DESPISE the new GUI would help convince Tim Cook that Johnny is BLIND and to hire back Scott. Or at least order the team to put the graphics back the way they were or something closer to it.

What happened to the Final Cut/Quicktime X "Dark" look? I wouldn't mind seeing at least an OPTION (WTF is that you ask?) for a DARK Mac interface. I can live with Mavericks look, but I don't want it getting any worse. I personally think Mountain Lion was pretty darn perfect save the improved multiple monitor support and OpenGL 4.0 (I already had a better tabbed Finder with XtraFinder so I couldn't care less about Apple's tabs there which look awful by comparison).

 

[Ckubrick2]

For some reason previous ios icons look more elegant and professional. Ios 7 icons look a bit "teenager" for me.

 

[oliversl]

I have never, ever had a problem learning how to use ios7. In fact everything works exactly the same as it did in ios6. It just looks nicer and more consistent throughout all the native apps.

You were never the problem. New users were.

 

[TwoBytes]

Former iOS Chief Scott Forstall Surfaces After Quiet Year of Traveling and Ph...

The pro apps have the 'dark look' as they are for professionals.

Ios 7 looks like a rainbow puked up on ios 6 because it's targeted to sell to preppy 12 year olds. Sorry to offend all the 12 year olds here, you are just an untapped market to make apple rich.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

The pro apps have the 'dark look' as they are for professionals.

Ios 7 looks like a rainbow puked up on ios 6 because it's targeted to sell to preppy 12 year olds. Sorry to offend all the 12 year olds here, you are just an untapped market to make apple rich.

So where's the "Pro" version of OSX with a dark look for the entire GUI? I'd like a preference switch, personally. I'd take skeuomorphism any day over this crayon colored Skittles rainbow crap.

 

[RainbowHurrican]

I know that there was an aura of anti-skeuomorphism floating around for a while there while everyone was excited about an iOS redesign, but iOS 7 really made me realize how much skeuomorphism was a good thing in iOS. It made the phone feel like home and made it feel familiar. You open any app and you immediately knew how to use it. It was an empowering feeling when I first used iOS for the first time (with the first iPod touch), the feeling of just *knowing* how to do everything.

5+ years later of using it and a redesign comes out and I've never been more confused and annoyed. Who seriously thought that white backgrounds and thin text was a good design and a good replacement for the familiarity that skeuomorphism offered? Forstall may have let the popularity get to his head (from what I heard) but ousting him was a huge mistake and totally undeserved. Apple lost the one person in the company with the most experience with iPhone UI and replaced him with somebody who hasn't touched software in his life, and the results show it. Ive is a master of hardware design but he has no idea what he's doing with software design, and iOS7 may look pretty on paper but usability has suffered badly. Say what you want about skeuomorphism, but it was just better than what we have now. For me, I'm just sad that a brilliant company like Apple allowed 6 years of engineering go to waste and be replaced by, frankly, amateur-hour-grade software design and programming.

Loosing Forestall hurt Apple in another way by slowing down development on multiple projects because other executives have to take up new roles. Thats why it really took so long to get the new PRO out and why it SIRI only makes minor progress. Besides its obvious that no one was really looking at the usability of iOS7. The 5c proves that IVE's designs are over rated and frankly the 5s has gotten stale and boring when compared to new models like the HTC ONE (I would love to have iOS 6 on the HTC One).

 

[anomie]

Nope. Never.

Ive is on the right track with iOS 7. It's lightyears ahead of every other mobile OS in terms of UI, ease-of-use and of course raw performance.

No, it's not. The performance did not improve with the new cold and uninspired ui design.
Ive killed almost everything non-techies loved about their ios.
Flat design uber alles and now the damage has been done.

 

[SusanK]

So he designed Aqua and worked with Apple pretty much since the beginning of the successful Apple (post NeXt), yet he was only fired for medium mistakes in a single iOS app? Sounds a bit harsh to me!

Forbes referred to Forstall as a CEO-in-waiting. More reason for Cook to fire him than that lame Maps excuse.

 

[darkgoob]

Yep I still have iOS 6 on my iPad and I will never upgrade it. It's perfect as far as I'm concerned.

iOS 7 came with my 5s and while it's very usable, I really don't like how the gestures confuse everything. Want to scroll around on a zoomed-in web page? OOPS! YOU JUST WENT "BACK." Want to tap on a text field so you can edit the text? OOPS! IT WAS TOO CLOSE TO THE TOP OF THE SCREEN, YOU JUST SCROLLED TO THE VERY TOP AND MADE THE URL BAR APPEAR! S:KLSFjslkdjfa;slf

They had to do some of what they did with the UI in order to divorce iOS from the physical screen size of iPhone and iPad, so they can come out with a bigger phone screen. iOS 8 is all about transitioning developers to that. I kind of think all of this is going to have turned iOS into something completely unrecognizable in another two years, compared to what we all knew and loved in iOS 6.

The idea of the device as appliance and the app as virtual hardware made manifest? What's it going to be like when iOS has basically turned itself into Android and Windows in order to "compete"?

Who is the visionary in charge now?

 

[I7guy]

...all of this is going to have turned iOS into something completely unrecognizable in another two years, compared to what some of us liked in iOS 6.

The idea of the device as appliance and the app as virtual hardware made manifest? What's it going to be like when iOS has basically turned itself into Android and Windows in order to "compete"?

Who is the visionary in charge now?

I to excluded myself from the universe of people who think IOS 6 is the end-all of all IOS versions.

 

[LizKat]

It's better in many ways. Bright ass white is not one of them. Inconsistent icon locations bug. Safari on ipad sucks. Just a few things that should be very simple.

imo "very simple" leaves out something that's important to me, which is the sandboxing. I don't care if they take a few iterations to improve on the outer aspects of functionality (what we call user friendliness) as long as they continue to have a care for the security of the innards.