Apple’s Next World Wide Developers Conference could mark a major turn in iOS, MacOS and iPado’s design language, according to a new report from Bloomberg.
Details are thin, but Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman claims that there is an effort to combine design and utility metaphors across these platforms, with much of it affected, at least partially, by Visionos running inside Vision Pro.
Apple’s expensive mixed reality headsets have not exactly taken the consumer world by storm, but there may be something about the interfle -floodetaphores that depend on sight and movements that appeal to Apple’s software designers.
Gurman claims that part of the effort is to make the platforms look the same. Of course, if you were to look at the safari or setting icons across all platforms, you would already notice significant similarities, with the only differences that are often if they are round or square icons.
Time for a change
It’s been some time since Apple significantly changed iOS and macos. The desktop platform saw a larger design update in 2020 with MacOS Big Sur (the same year as the first Apple Silicon Macs).
Ioss’s last major overhaul dates from a decade when it scrubbed most of the original iPhone’s scary design away.
Skeuomorphism is where icons are similar to the thing they represent. The image’s app was a photo of a flower. The app app was a trio with almost tubable gear, AviKiosk was a bookshelf filled with subscriptions, and the calendar looked like so much as an old desk calendar that you were tempted to tear a side right from the screen.
If you look at today’s iOS, you can see how flat and clean everything is and it is mostly Jony Ive’s work. Apple’s former leader of Design loved a pure aesthetic, and starting with iOS 7 he came his way.
This new effort can be an opportunity to bring these different platforms into a unified visual and functional whole.
They should not see and work both slavishly, but there could be benefits of pushing them in that direction. It can be shoveling if an action works a way on the iPhone and differently on Mac, iPad and even Vision Pro.
It is hoped that Apple Intelligence and a much smarter SIRI (available on all platforms) could help with some of this confusion, but the integration process in the deepest part of each operating system has not gone as fast or smooth as we all expected.
Can Apple find the sweet spot with uniformity and differentiation that makes sense to its huge user base? Perhaps.
And we wouldn’t mind a little return to skeuomorphism. Having icons similar to their purpose is a form of brevity and will always help beginners to learn. The counter to it – and that is a reasonable argument – is that when designing software to look like current hardware, the software will be outdated as soon as progress remakes these objects.
The fact that our iPhone 16 Pro Max’s “phone” icon still looks like a 20th century phone is almost comical. Gen Z has never seen or used a phone that looks like this.
Which brings me to another major question. Will iOS 19 Redesign be so radical that it will remove the iconic phone app icon? I hope not, but I guess everything is possible.
Whatever is the case, WWDC 25 looks like it will be a big moment for the Apple ecosystem. Of course, every platform sees upgrades during these events, but usually not in this rumor scale.
Hold on to your iPhones, iPads and MacBook; This can be a wild, visual trip.
