Critics Hate Apple's iOS 7 Design

In the last 24 hours of its announcement, the blogosphere lit up with criticism of the new Apple iOS, with critics calling it "confusing" and "ugly."

Most of the criticism is spent on the redesign, which has been called "childish" and akin to "clip art", according to The Verge. It also managed to capture tweets from similar-minded folk which praised the ease of the iOS 7 but also said, "But, wow, the ugly stick."

The problem is that the new icons are simple, primary-colored buttons -- not exactly the artistic pieces that users are used to seeing. The other problem, according to The Verge, is that the icons vary widely from app to app which causes confusion for the user. Other problems are that the new version of  the operating system doesn't lessen the annoyance of new message notifications at the top of the screen -- instead it makes it harder to find the X to close it. The new Control Center seems like a place where Apple threw everything it couldn't fit anywhere else. While useful, it can also be seen as a junkpile that a user has to sort through.

Phil Ryu, an app developer, did say that it appeared "cluttered" and the icons were harder to read with its pencil-thin typography, but that it the whole design was meant to be "minimalist" and for users to concentrate on content rather than pretty pictures, according to Wall Street Journal. Many also noticed that Apple may have been emulating competitors such as Google and Microsoft (we didn't see Microsoft.)

The primary colors do remind us of a little of Google, especially for its well-used Gmail and Google Maps apps on the iOS. But is the criticism a bit shallow? Should critics be hammering Apple for using "clip art" when they're supposed to be dealing with functionality? Or is this all because Apple set the bar so high for itself, that its fans always expect a little more even in typography and images? We think it's the latter.

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