This year at WWDC, Apple announced iOS 7, the largest and most significant redesign of iOS to date. The software update is not merely a visual change, but rather a revision of the platform’s fundamental design paradigms. Content has been maximized and stretched from edge to edge while interaction has been streamlined for efficiency.

Ever since the departure of Scott Forstall from Apple, speculation has been brewing about the end of skeuomorphic design, and the movement toward flat design in iOS. With the appointment of Jony Ive as leader of Human Interface, hope strengthened, believing his modernist principles would remove the nonsensical glosses and textures. Throughout this period of speculation and comparison, the term ‘flat’ has been used to describe a counter-style to skeuomorphism. Flat design is characterized by textureless surfaces, solid colors, and an emphasis on typography. It seemed that the only two examples people could come up with were Windows 8′s Metro UI and Loren Brichter’s Letterpress app.

History shows that Apple pays attention to trends and listens to feature requests, but they never simply provide a requested feature. There is always a twist or improvement which differentiates Apple’s feature implementation from its competitor. Examples? Effective multitasking without sacrificing battery life; larger and smaller iPhones and iPads without losing usability and aesthetics. In like manner, there is much more behind Apple’s take on flat design than just removing shadows and gradients.

iOS 7 is certainly ‘flatter,’ but there are several ironies within Apple’s implementation that mock the very notion of flat. Apple has replaced fake depth (i.e. gloss, texture, shadows) with real depth (i.e. translucency, layering, and parallax). With the use of physics based animations, Apple has replaced the mimetic visual design of previous versions with a realistic behaving interface. Interface elements no longer float around the screen, but now they bounce, wiggle, and collide with each other.

This new update presents many opportunities while simultaneously creating a few problems for developers to address. iOS provides the opportunity for developers to stop polishing their chrome and instead focus on enhancing their content. In the past, using Apple’s stock UI was associated with a lack of effort. Designers wanted to make their apps stand out so they made custom interface elements. An app like Instagram, for instance, paid fine attention to detail with a completely custom interface from the action sheets to the switches. This time consuming process of interface customization is no longer a requirement in iOS 7. Apple’s provided UI elements look and work great. Some elements even have complex implementations behind them such as the transparent navigation and tab bars or the parallax alert view. The new stock UI should be popular with users if iOS 7 itself is readily accepted. Instead of focusing on building custom UI, developers can now focus on maximizing their content by leveraging new features such as background fetch or the many enhancements to typography.

With all the significant changes, a question arises of how to support multiple versions of iOS. Should you try to support two separate designs, one for iOS 6 and one for 7? Can the style of 7 be ported over to 6? Or should developers simply follow Apple and only support the latest release. In a later post, I will talk more about the deciding factors of which versions to support.

iOS 7 really is a whole new world which challenges the way app designers think about design, animation, and content. Just as Apple has rethought their system apps, many developers will need to rethink the way their apps look and work. At WWDC Apple presented a challenge for developers and much opportunity awaits those who accept it.