Apple’s next World Wide Developers Conference could mark a major pivot in iOS, macOS, and iPadOS design language, according to a new report from Bloomberg.
Details are thin, but Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman claims that there’s an effort to unify the designs and usage metaphors across these platforms, with much of it influenced, at least in part, by visionOS, which runs inside Vision Pro.
Apple’s pricey mixed reality headset hasn’t exactly taken the consumer world by storm, but there may be something about the interface metaphors, which rely on sight and gestures, that appeal to Apple’s software designers.
Gurman claims that part of the effort is to make the platforms look similar. Of course, if you were to look at the Safari or Settings icons across all platforms, you would already notice significant similarities, with the only differences often being if they are round or square icons.
Time for a change
It has been some time since Apple significantly altered iOS and macOS. The desktop platform saw a major design update in 2020 with macOS Big Sur (the same year as the first Apple Silicon Macs).
iOS’s last big overhaul dates back over a decade, when it scrubbed away most of the original iPhone’s skeuomorphic design.
Skeuomorphism is where icons look like the thing they represent. The Photos app was a photo of a flower. The Settings app was a trio of almost touchable gears, Newsstand was a bookshelf filled with subscriptions, and the Calendar looked so much like an old desk calendar that you were tempted to rip a page right off the screen.
If you look at today’s iOS, you can see how flat and clean everything is, and that’s mostly Jony Ive’s work. Apple’s former head of design loved a clean aesthetic, and starting with iOS 7, he got his way.
This new effort might be an opportunity to bring these disparate platforms into some unified visual and functional whole.
They should not look and work alike slavishly, but there could be benefits in Apple pushing them in that direction. It can be jarring if an action works one way on the iPhone and differently on the Mac, iPad, and even the Vision Pro.
One would hope that Apple Intelligence and a much smarter Siri (available on all platforms) could help with some of that confusion, but the process of integration into the deepest part of each operating system has not gone as fast or smoothly as we all were expecting.
Can Apple find that sweet spot of uniformity and differentiation that makes sense for its vast user base? Maybe.
And we wouldn’t mind a little return to skeuomorphism. Having icons that look like their purpose is a form of shorthand and will always help beginners learn. The counter to that – and it is a fair argument – is that when you design software to look like current hardware, the software will be outdated as soon as progress remakes those objects.
The fact that our iPhone 16 Pro Max’s “phone” icon still looks like a 20th-century phone handset is almost comical. Gen Z has never seen or used a phone that looks like that.
Which brings me to another major question. Will the iOS 19 redesign be so radical that it will do away with that iconic phone app icon? I hope not, but I guess anything is possible.
Whatever the case, WWDC 25 looks like it’ll be a big moment for the Apple ecosystem. Sure, every platform sees upgrades during these events, but usually not at this rumored scale.
Hold onto your iPhones, iPads, and MacBook; this could be a wild, visual ride.
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