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The Fragmentation of iOS’s UI Design

Benjamin Mayo on the state of iconography in Apple’s built-in iOS apps:

My gripe is there is no consistency, no structure or logic to this. Apps introduced later sometimes use rounded icons, sometimes not, sometimes create all-new custom glyphs of their own. Incredulously, you could open flagship apps like Messages, Mail and Safari and have no idea Apple was even playing with bold icons as a conceptual change. These apps adopted the iOS 11 large bold navigation bar title formats, but their icons and glyphs have stagnated for more than four years at this point.

Mayo uses eight examples of Apple’s action icon to emphasize the design inconsistencies.

Since iOS 7, each revision of iOS has felt like a tentative design experiment, with icons in a handful of apps moving in different directions. The trouble is, Apple doesn’t seem to have settled on a clear winner among the several options tested, which has begun to make the UI feel directionless. Although rumors seem to indicate that a design refresh of iOS is at least another year off, I hope we’ll start to see indications of where iOS design is going this year at WWDC.