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App developer: iOS 7 commits an ‘unjustifiable’ crime against good design

Updated Dec 19th, 2018 8:43PM EST
iOS 7 Criticism

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When it comes to Apple’s huge redesign in iOS 7, feelings have certainly been mixed. iOS 7 is a huge renovation of Apple’s popular mobile platform and while we found it to be the perfect blend of new design and familiar functionality, others were not so impressed. The new mobile software has taken several beatings from respected designers, and some app developers and user experience experts aren’t terribly fond of iOS 7 either. The latest critique comes from Jared Sinclair, who has released several sleek iOS apps including Riposte and Whisper for App.net, and he doesn’t mince words at all. Sinclair has many complaints about iOS 7, but there is one in particular that he describes as an “unjustifiable” design error that forgoes rudimentary design principles and makes for a very bad user experience.

Sinclair says that iOS is all about touch and earlier versions of the mobile software always made touch targets clear. Buttons, for example, looked like buttons. But in iOS 7, Apple removed all of the platform’s button borders and instead uses only text and icons to indicate button locations.

“iOS 7’s designers have abandoned bordered buttons in favor of borderless colored text,” Sinclair wrote in a post on his blog. “I think this choice is unjustifiable. It is the root cause of my deep dislike for how it feels to use iOS 7. It introduces unnecessary tension and makes everything less usable than it ought to be.”

He continued, “Color alone simply cannot be the way to identify a button. You don’t touch a color. You touch an area. To activate a button, you must touch a spot inside of its boundary. Text floating in the middle of vast whitespace doesn’t define a boundary. Only borders define boundaries.”

The developer goes on to compare iOS 7 to iOS 6 and he makes a very strong argument that Apple’s new design is a serious step backwards where logic and usability are concerned.

Zach Epstein
Zach Epstein Executive Editor

Zach Epstein has been the Executive Editor at BGR for more than 10 years. He manages BGR’s editorial team and ensures that best practices are adhered to. He also oversees the Ecommerce team and directs the daily flow of all content. Zach first joined BGR in 2007 as a Staff Writer covering business, technology, and entertainment.

His work has been quoted by countless top news organizations, and he was recently named one of the world's top 10 “power mobile influencers” by Forbes. Prior to BGR, Zach worked as an executive in marketing and business development with two private telcos.