Jony Ive is an industrial designer. He doesn't have any experience or expertise doing the visual design of software, and he clearly needs better advisors and collaborators to work with.
I understand that he's enamored with the "honesty" of designing software that eschews emulating real world materials and objects. That might explain why "voice memos" has abandoned the metaphor of an old microphone in favor of a sound wave.
But the current direction is an inconsistent mess. The camera icon has changed to use something that looks like an SLR camera. Why not use a shutter or something more symbolic? Notes icon looks like a real notepad. Settings is an old gear, which is ironically the opposite of anything digital. Videos is still the old clapboard. Mail still uses an envelope. But photos uses a more abstract "flower". Game center is the worst of all -- an unintelligibly abstract metaphor of overlapping circles rendered as if they are real world objects, with glossy highlights.
Interactive elements are spectacularly inconsistent. Buttons have been largely abandoned, replaced with colored text. But sometimes we still get buttons. Sometimes they have square corners and sometimes they have rounded corners. Sometimes they are filled in, and sometimes they are just outlines. Sometimes they are circular. They are almost always flat. Except for the on/off switches which still look like an actual switch.
I mean, WTF. There is zero vision here.
