> Look at most of the articles written after iOS 7 came out, people were horrified.

Some people were horrified. It's a gross exaggeration to say most people were horrified. I think the tech press in general tended towards the "horrified" angle because the tech press loves to magnify any seeming flaw in what Apple is doing. It makes for good page views. But the tech press is not the same thing as Apple's customer base. And like any sweeping design change, some people love it, some people hate it, most people are probably pretty indifferent but will tend to lean towards criticizing anything new for the sake of it being new (and then very quickly getting used to it and completely forgetting they pooh-poohed it to begin with).

> People had to get used to the blur and parallax, because they had no choice.

What does that mean? Every design choice in a product "forces" people to get used to it. This statement is pretty meaningless, except in that you're trying to imply that people had to be forced to use the new design, which is as stupid as it is untrue.

> Some people got vertigo and seizures from all the movement, so Apple had to tone it down a bit

Apple had the switch to tone it down from the beginning. All they "had to do" was slightly increase the effect of the switch. But the fact that you're criticizing Apple for providing a switch to reduce motion effects is ridiculous. That would be like criticizing them for providing the "Increase Contrast" option, which incidentally is right next to the "Reduce Motion" option under Accessibility settings. Except it's commonly accepted that people have vision problems and benefit from accessibility options geared towards them (side note: Apple is famous for the rich accessibility support they provide in both iOS and OS X), the only thing different here is that having an accessibility option for people with vertigo has not previously been something that anybody ever thought about.

> And if all you can say is that apple's design is flat but not AS flat as Google [...]

That's not all I can say. It's completely incorrect for you to make that assertion, and it suggests that you are not arguing in good faith.

> I think iOS 7 was Apple's Vista. Look at the exodus to Android when it came out.

Wild hyperbole is not an effective arguing tactic. Nobody would ever seriously consider iOS 7 to be equivalent to what is widely considered one of the highest-profile tech flops ever, especially given that iOS 7 reached a staggering 87% adoption rate after less than 7 months[1]. And there was no exodus to Android, I don't even know where you got that idea from and I highly suspect you made it up on the spot.

[1]: http://www.zdnet.com/ios-7-adoption-skyrockets-to-87-percent...

> 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.

You can find tons of articles hating every new design that's ever been produced for anything popular. People dislike change in general, and the press in particular find that articles critical of popular new things become popular articles. This is one of the reasons why the tech press tries to magnify every possible perceived issue as much as they can.

And again with the "many people". Some people thought that. Or actually, I seem to recall seeing one person suggest that, which was quickly forgotten. That was not a generally-accepted possibility.

> [...] 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

Absolute bullshit. I already told you that trying to invoke Steve's ghost was distasteful, and now you're doubling down. As I already said, he was quite infamous for his ability to change his mind and directly contradict previous claims he'd made, and he did so quite regularly. You cannot possibly think to speak for him. The fact that you're continuing to do so is rather repulsive.

> yadda yadda yadda more claims about group messaging being broken with zero evidence, and a laughably absurd claim about being able to email sjobs@apple.com and having it be fixed immediately

...

> 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!

No it doesn't. It takes a photo if you tap the photo button. But if you're putting your finger down on the photo button then that's already too high to display Control Center. Trying to claim it's taking a photo means you are blaming the OS for your own complete incompetence in the act of swiping up from the bottom of the display. Everybody else seems to have figured out that you start with your finger off the bottom of the screen and swipe upwards and onto the screen. But I guess you thought trying to make up completely invalid "bugs" in iOS for internet arguments was a better idea.

> links to pictures for the in-call status bar

That picture is wrong. The color shown there is wildly off. Measuring the picture, the color it's showing apparently doesn't even display in sRGB, but the closest I can get is #21EF00. The actual color of the status bar as measured from the iOS Simulator (running 7.1, since that's the earliest sim that works with current tools) is #44DB5E. And I'm pretty sure this is a fault with the image, not a difference between iOS 7.0 and 7.1, because not only have I never seen such a neon green ever show up on my iPhone before, but the Facebook blue color is also wrong.

So yeah, if you go by images found on the internet that have their colors messed up, then you can make all sorts of incorrect claims about the usability of the OS!

> 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.

I'm having a hard time believing that you're serious with this. Apple made MobileSafari significantly easier to use. It moves the chrome out of the way while still retaining full usability. From a usability perspective, it's so nice to use it almost feels like magic. I was genuinely gleeful when I realized that even though the bottom bar was hidden, tapping on the bottom edge of the the screen brought it back so I could use the controls on it.

The fact that some web designers had their ugly stupid workarounds broken is kind of a good thing. Websites that deliberately attempt to hide the browser chrome are a bad thing. It breaks usability, since the browser chrome is no longer predictable.

> [...] minimal-ui [...]

That was added in 7.1. And I don't think I ever actually saw it get used. It was presumably removed in iOS 8 either because of changes to the behavior of Safari's chrome that made it not usable, or because it didn't do the job right, or because Apple wanted to make the browser chrome even more consistent, or maybe some other reason entirely. I don't know. But the fact that I never actually saw it in the wild is suggestive that it really doesn't matter that it was removed. This is not the first time Apple has added something in one OS version and removed it in another. And it surely won't be the last.

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

Funny, I just uploaded an image to imgur.com just fine on my iOS 8 device: http://imgur.com/CRZ4dCU

> 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.

No it doesn't. It only speaks to how people like you leap to conclusions based on a complete lack of any evidence whatsoever as to what went wrong and what, if anything, it indicates about their processes.