What do you mean by that? iOS 7 saw the introduction of a new design, with new design language, created entirely by Apple rather than mimicking other companies.

Apple has always had a distinctive style and design language. It had to do with aesthetically pleasing skeumorphic appearance. Look at most of the articles written after iOS 7 came out, people were horrified. Don't get me wrong, iOS 7 was still progress, but despite the design, not because of it. It had things like the new control center, more WebOS-like app switching, etc.

Apple's design is flatter than before, but it's not _flat_. If anything, the blur and parallax create an even deeper design than it was when it was skeuomorphic.

People had to get used to the blur and parallax, because they had no choice. Some people got vertigo and seizures from all the movement, so Apple had to tone it down a bit (but not get rid of it).

And if all you can say is that apple's design is flat but not AS flat as Google, which isn't as flat as Microsoft ... that's not saying a lot. I think iOS 7 was Apple's Vista. Look at the exodus to Android when it came out.

Minor point: You can find tons of articles hating the new icons. Many people thought the white background of Safari was a placeholder icon. Nope.

I find it rather distasteful to invoke the memory of Steve to try and make a point like this. Did you know Steve personally? I doubt it. Similarly, I doubt you can predict what he would have done.

I've watched a lot of Steve Jobs videos - interviews and documentaries and back-and-forths from when he came back to Apple, and I'm going off of what he explicitly said and valued. I think I'm being pretty true to what he explicitly said and pushed for.

Steve Jobs used to praise when things on screen looked "familiar", and famously called the new iOS buttons "lickable".

If anything he went overboard: http://www.cultofmac.com/189707/steve-jobs-himself-is-respon...

People didn't need the visual affordance to tell what was a tappable button anymore, or to understand that the colored navigation bar at the top was a distinct UI element from the content below it. Skeuomorphism outlasted its utility, and thus, once the last holdout (Forestall) was gone, it was excised from the OS.

No, Forstall was gone because Tim Cook fired him, after Steve Jobs passed away. Tim Cook explained that he did this to increase collaboration after Steve Jobs. Note that Steve did NOT fire Forstall and replace him with Jony Ive even after Forstall had messed up royally after being placed in charge of Maps (to be fair, Maps was almost impossible to pull off in time, and Forstall took the blame).

I think there were two iPhone fiascos under Steve, one was the battery and the other was Maps. Compare with the number of fiascos now (iOS 8.1 anyone?) ... my company makes an app called Groups, and iOS 7 broke group messaging for EVERY app on iOS and Apple just flat-out never fixed it. It's STILL BROKEN. Yes, the iOS lies to the apps and says the message is sent, but sometimes it just doesn't send it. What is that? I would have emailed sjobs@apple.com and he would have had it fixed in the next version.

What are you talking about? The OS-provided video controls are displayed on top of a neutral grey background (with blur).

I am talking about this:
http://www.tuicool.com/articles/nARn22

What are you seeing that elicited the "whoops"?

In the camera app, it appears that I could swipe up to reveal the control center with the flashlight. But instead, it just takes a photo!

Oh yeah while I'm on the camera app, remember how in iOS 7 Apple just decided to make a non-obvious control that you had to SWIPE instead of tapping? That took a while to figure out. Also Apple decided to replace the beautiful-looking option-selectors with a "3d fisheye" version that made it hard to see anything and couldn't fit as many items anymore. etc. etc. The new design decisions were hardly consistent, and seemed to be done "just because it's cool to do translucency".

As for reading text, that's fairly hyperbolic. White text isn't as readable as it is on a black background, but it's still quite readable.

before:
http://d37rcl8t6g8sj5.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/face...

after:
http://i.stack.imgur.com/bPcm8.png ... what genius signed off on making the status bar show white text on light neon green during a call? compare the readability to the previous.

I have no idea what you're referring to here. Can you elaborate?

Apple broke a lot of mobile websites and lots of web designers gave it zero love after iOS 7. They had just figured out how to make their apps go fullscreen with scrollTo(0, 1) that worked across iOS and Android. And then Apple ruined it all, touting how their interface "gets out of the way" when it fact it would pop in whenever a person tried to, say, touch a button on the bottom or top of the screen, making the person do a double-take and have to tap AGAIN.

Then they kind of conceded by adding "minimal-ui" to the HTML which would make the UI disappear. But then in iOS 8 they took it away again, and went back to something like iOS 6. No consistent direction, just experimenting and apologizing. That's not what Apple was before.

Oh and in iOS 8, they broke file uploading... so yeah, you can't even upload photos anymore.

What are you talking about? Perhaps you're referring to 8.0.1, which was replaced a day later by 8.0.2? The issue with 8.0.1 has not even the slightest shred of relation to design.

Right, but it speaks to how the company now pushes things out, and what processes are in place to assure quality and consistency through the whole development process.