Eli Schiff, from his series Fall of the Designer:
App development studios know well that they must appeal to such a sensibility and tailor their designs to the flat aesthetic should they want to be approved and featured by the operating system designers who run the app stores. Thus whether or not they agreed with modern minimalism, these app developers and designers were forced to follow suit and flatten their interfaces. In doing so, the interfaces have undoubtedly lost the personality they once had.
Though I don’t agree with Schiff’s seeming opposition to flat design trends overall (and while keeping I mind that I am no designer, rather one who simply appreciates good design) I did find myself quietly lamenting the loss of aesthetics like those used by Tapbots in the pre-iOS 7 days.
Part of me looks forward to a time when the fashion of flat has been around long enough that an app like Vesper, say, can be flat and feel right while an app like Tweetbot or Calcbot can have more personality and whimsy in addition to clever animations which are deemed a permissible flair in the current climate.
Schiff’s section concerning the sound effects of Tweetbot, previously reinforcing the Twitter robot conceit of the iOS 6-and-before app, is particularly on point, as the current design retains the robotic sound design, connecting to the memories of old Tweetbot while being strangely inexplicable (aside from one link, the name) to a new user.
At one point during the shift to iOS 7, I imagined a Tweetbot with visible gears and sliding plates of glass resembling the complicated internals of a mechanical watch. I wonder if there’s not some future in which apps like this can and will exist.