I posted this elsewhere first, but it really belongs here at MR as well. Since there are already so many dozens of "hate iOS7 threads," I picked this one to add my thoughts. And you know what really upsets me? I just read this evening that after spending 9 hours taking my daughter back up to college so I was too busy to roll my wife's phone back, Apple has decided to stop signing iOS6 ALREADY so I can't get my wife back to the OS she knows and loves. Maybe if I take her phone back to Apple and ask for a replacement, but I digress. I think the pendulum swung way too far over to the "plain white OS" this time! While I'm not ready to go running over to Samsung, Apple has got some work to do to redeem themselves. BTW, yesterday I was in Best Buy and noticed there were people at the Samsung booth, both staff and customers while the Apple booth was deserted. Also the Samsung booth was constructed to be tall enough that you can't see the Apple booth from the store entrance, only the Samsung booth. I thought Tim Cook and his team were on top of things like this? Anyway, I digressed again. Let me get to why despite the fact I find it easy enough to use most of the time, for many users I think iOS7 stinks.
I downloaded iOS7 for me. It's ok. Just ok. I mean I like the quick setup screen. I've gotten used to the half screen swipe to get to Spotlight. But the whiteness of the UI is overpowering. If you're gonna make something so strongly monochromatic, you owe it to the user to allow them to tone it down. Normally I hate light grey on dark grey stuff but skinny black text swimming in an ocean of white is awful. It's far to bright to be used at night. What the heck were they thinking getting rid of ALL clues to let the user know how the UI works? I mean spinners should look like slot machine wheels, not static lists that a person has to tinker with to see how they work. My wife stopped at the time setting screen. And I mean stopped. She stared at it for a good 10 minutes before handing it to me. I remembered (purely from memory and not from anything I could see on the screen) that the date and time settings are wheels you can spin. When I showed her, she said "Oh yeah, now I remember." Look. When we used mainframes, the user could be expected to remember what a chunk of text did on a green screen. Now that we have thousands of pixels, why not spend a few of them letting a novice (or tired expert) user know he's dealing with a slot machine spinner and not a static list of dates to click on?
Let me be blunt. Apple screwed the pooch on iOS7. Jony Ive may be an industrial design genius but remember it wasn't just Scott Forestall that liked skeuomorphisms, it was Steve Jobs. I imagine that bland white screen of very few non-white pixels appeals to some aesthetic. I'm not there to look at the thing and admire it. I'm there to use it. Ugly is better than pretty if it's easier to use. There's a reason digital slot machines still show columns of spinning fruit on an LCD screen. That particular skeuomorphism is necessary to communicate to the user the kind of machine he is playing. Otherwise why not simply scan the rfid in the user's comp card as they enter the casino and let them know whether they've won by the time they walk up to the machine? Sometimes less really is... less.