The dust is settling now after the much-awaited iOS sneak peak at the last WWDC. Several betas have come out and they are improving the product in every iteration. The opinions were widely polarised initially and the dust seems to have settling now. I am humbled too and ate my words - nothing new as these situations are so associated with anything that Apple does. It's always been part of the magical story of the company that Apple is. I remember how surprising it was to see the new look and feel - it did look a bit of android (lock screen) and windows (fonts in Contacts, white background) in parts. The home screen and the actual app’s interface looked two extremes. The fact is I, like many others, refused to accept the simple fact that iOS has entered a new phase of life - in Six years it matured and grew. iOS now clearly understands the crowd it caters to. Look at the two design issues I mentioned above - at the first look it seems like the lock screen is like one that they have in android, but the fonts? They are different. Remember the Roboto - See how subtle and beautiful the difference is.
The era of instant gratification has caught many of us unawares and we missed the larger picture. We couldn't understand, to bring such a visible change, how confident the management and the engineering teams were, how much they trusted their intuition and how they visualised the future. I didn't see it, I admit .
Apple. You taught me many things over the last 6 years.