The iOS game Letterpress and to-do list app Clear, for example, look like they’ve parachuted onto iOS from another planet. The team behind Clear very intentionally steered away from a traditional iOS user interface — instead choosing a theme that is very flat and geometric with vivid colors. Besides Apple, its creators also drew on inspiration from other apps and sources, including rival Microsoft’s Metro style, Phill Ryu, one of the three co-creators behind Clear, told me in a recent interview.

Letterpress

While Ryu has great respect for Apple’s skeuomorphic design style that leans heavily on real-world metaphors, extra bells and whistles weren’t appropriate for his category of app.

“We felt as an app to help you get stuff done, the interface should 100 percent focus on those things and nothing else, so it was an exercise in keeping the number of puzzle pieces minimal,” he said.

A much larger team at Google, meanwhile, has been wowing Apple users with its revamped Mail, Maps, Search and YouTube apps. The look is coherent across its iOS apps, while at the same time abandoning Apple’s menu styles and UI touches like page curls. This came about after the company started devoting teams to developing apps for iOS that retained their “Googliness.”

A new era for iOS

Clear

We’re witnessing a turning point for design in the iOS era. From the time Apple opened the iOS App Store in mid-2008, it has been the main influence on third-party app makers. Through the iOS SDK as well as benchmarking best practices for developers at its WWDC conference, Apple’s design teams set the tone and made it arbiter of taste for design and user interfaces on iOS.

As we’ve seen, there’s now a limit to that influence. Some designers are just flat-out sick of the same old Apple look. Depending on how you look at it, this change could be considered an embarrassing turn for Apple: One of Steve Jobs’ most important and enduring legacies is his eye for design. The intuitive desktop metaphor of the original Macintosh, the ultraslim packaging of the MacBook Air, and the basics of iPhone software have inspired untold numbers of copycats and homages.

That designers are beginning to go their own way on Apple’s mobile platform is a sea change in the iOS era — but it may also be inevitable. Some of the app makers now working on iOS have been at it for nearly half a decade. The diversity we’re seeing in user interfaces and design language can be attributed to the platform’s maturity, users’ experience, as well as the need for brands to stand out among the more than 700,000 other apps Apple offers.

Trying not to fit in

Because of the size of the iOS store, companies naturally look for ways for to stand out from the crowd. For companies like Google, that means distinctive branding.

“[Apps] extending their brands are looking different because it’s now possible to build really complex apps on mobile,” said Daniel Raffel, who created the Snapguide app. “People need to distinguish themselves and their brands.” The downside is “it just takes a lot of work.” And not every app-making team or company has the time, resources or know-how to spend time on customized widgets or rewriting whole parts of apps.

That explains why there are just a few really skilled or resource-rich teams that are doing meaningfully different iOS design successfully.

Experienced designers can take creative license

Loren Brichter, the creator of Tweetie and Letterpress, tries to apply a different standard to his app than roughly 99 percent of others. He’s not drawn to design fads; he just gave his word game a very simple look because he believes that kind of design is what works most smoothly with the iPhone’s graphics engine, as compared to more popular, complex designs. “Flat, simple shapes lend themselves naturally to [the] current hardware,” he told me.

But Brichter is vastly experienced and regarded as one of the best developers working on Apple’s platform today. Ryu, who helped build Clear, compared Apple’s basic design principles to style guidelines for writers: “It’s like MLA writing style guides and stuff, it’s a great guide for beginning writers when you are most worried about making mistakes. But then you grow as a writer and start developing your own style, and bending the rules to suit various stories, and the MLA rules start holding you back from potential greatness.”

The case for skeuomorphism

You can argue what’s drawn hundreds of millions of mobile users to iOS devices over the years is Apple’s reliance on skeuomorphic design in its software. It’s what let everyone from “2-year-olds to 90-year-old technophobes” feel instantly comfortable interacting with an iPhone or iPad, Ryu pointed out.

Apple’s Find My Friends exemplifies its taste for skeuomorphic details like stitched leather

There are some in the design community who advocate thinking beyond this style, not because it’s “tacky” or old, but because of who the average user is now. Floppy disks, for example, don’t mean “save” to young people who have never used a floppy disk in their life. “Because we have so many people who are digital natives that don’t know the thing being referenced, it’s probably not an appropriate design fad going forward,” said Raffel.

But tablets are obviously not exclusively the province of educated Millennials. Plenty of people still need Apple’s basic design cues, which can act as “training wheels,” Ryu said. Sure, some people may not need them anymore. “But the way the smartphone market is still growing, I would posit it still makes sense to include training wheels by default.”

The future of iOS design

Jobs was the driving force behind the preference for those skeuomorphic details in iOS. He loved the stitched leather and spiral notebooks and torn pages. But as has been previously reported, a war over the future of that philosophy has erupted as those in industrial design head Jony Ive’s circle wanted to move on from that look.

Now that Ive is in charge of all of Apple’s interfaces, it’s a good bet he will get his way and a new era of iOS design will emerge in Cupertino. But it’s probably not going to be radical and it’s probably going to happen slowly. If the company sticks to its yearly release schedule that means that the next chance for Apple to exact any big or even medium-sized iOS design changes won’t come for more than six months.

It’s a testament to the flexibility of Apple’s platform and the dedication of its third-party developers to work hard to create the most innovative and forward-thinking apps for its platform. But it’s certainly a strange turning of the tables — not only that Microsoft and other designers are inspiring Apple developers, but that Apple itself is no longer the main influencer of what is considered cutting edge design on its own platform.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user jikatu

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At 28, he’s already left quite a stamp on mobile interfaces: he’s the guy who invented that neat trick where you “pull” down on an iPhone screen to refresh the page of an app. Many of the most popular iOS apps use it now, including Facebook and Apple’s own Mail app. Same with his fast-scrolling technique for apps. Oh, and he sold Tweetie, which the Verge dubbed “the best Twitter app ever,” to Twitter itself, at the age of 25.

Brichter started his career in tech at the top: he was recruited out of college six months before graduation by Apple, to work on the iPod team. He ended up declining the offer. But Apple kept after him and dangled another job after he graduated: this one, luckily enough, on Scott Forstall’s brand new and super-secret iPhone team.

Brichter’s new iOS app, Letterpress, is a slick two-player word game that’s had much of the tech and design world buzzing when it was released in late October. It saw a fast uptake among users too: 60,000 downloads in the first day; now 1 million after the first month. But there’s a whole lot more going on inside than just the ability to create word strings.

Letterpress

The sole employee and proprietor of Atebits, Brichter is among the smartest and most innovative user interface developers working on Apple’s mobile platform today. That’s why Letterpress, though a well-designed amusement to fill downtime, is for him is not really a game but “a Trojan Horse” for an extremely ambitious — or as he put it to me, “insane” — experiment with the future of how graphics are displayed on a mobile device.

He built his own version of the user interface framework, the software that sits right above the graphics processor on an iOS device. Apple creates that for developers — it was completely unnecessary for him to do this. But this is the kind of thing he considers “fun.”

“It’s insane,” he admitted. “But I wanted to experiment with different ways of driving graphics … Apple’s [UIKit] is the best, but I wanted to try.” The experiment was a resounding success — and now has a million guinea pigs testing his code via Letterpress. And, he said, “there have been zero issues” with what he built.

On a bitterly cold day last week, we met up over coffee in a tiny Center City Philadelphia cafe, where we talked about the how working as a solo app developer has changed over the years, how he misses burritos and everything about California except the weather (!), and what he expects from the new era of design at Apple.

The changing App Store

Brichter, who comes across very humble, sincerely said he has no idea if 1 million downloads of an app in its first month is actually good or not.

“The App Store is so big now that I don’t know if that necessarily is a success or not. I didn’t necessarily define success [going into it].” And it’s totally different than his first big hit, Tweetie, the Twitter client he sold to Twitter in 2010. “You can’t compare them,” he insisted. “Tweetie was a paid app,” whereas Letterpress is free.

We write a lot here about how tough it is, especially for small developers, to stand out these days in Apple’s gigantic App Store. But you won’t find Brichter pining for the old days.

“I started [programming] 10 years ago with original OS X public beta. It’s been a long run for me. … At the same time, someone nowadays has all of these tools available, like Cocos2D, GitHub, StackOverflow; they can get on the App Store and get exposed to millions of people. It’s downright easy now,” he said.

How he works

Clearly, Brichter chooses his projects well. So how does he know what will work?

Everything needs to line up, he said. He uses the analogy of walking through a forest and you suddenly glimpse that view where all the trees happen to align perfectly and you can glimpse an unobstructed opening. That’s how he knows when to pursue a project.

“You have to consider every tree,” he said. “With the Letterpress idea, a whole bunch of things happened to align that made that an obvious thing to pursue: games had taken over the App Store, I wanted to try a free app, and I wanted to test a whole bunch of other technologies.”

High hopes for the future of iOS design

Design is one of Brichter’s passions and specialties. So while he demurred when I asked him what he thought of his old team leader Forstall getting ousted from Apple — he says he didn’t work directly with him at all — he raved about Jony Ive’s elevation in the Apple pantheon and what that will mean.

“I’m excited about Ive” taking over the Human Interface group at Apple, where he will lead both industrial design and the design of the software that runs on it. “He has good taste.” He paused. “But more important than good taste, he has the ability to” — he points to the MacBook Air in front of me — “he’s true to the materials, to the medium he’s working in. One of my complaints about design of iOS is it’s doing things that aren’t true to the hardware.”

“My design goals with Letterpress were to do things that the graphics hardware was really good at. [Ive] is the kind of person who has the same aesthetic. It’s not superficial — he’d think about [the design of iOS and an iOS device] all the way through” not just make something that looked good, he said.

When I mention is Apple known for that — thinking hardware and software through so they work together, he acknowledges that it used to be like that.  “But I don’t know when that disconnect happened.”

Why skeuomorphism isn’t dead at Apple

All this talk of the skeuomorphic design philosophy favored by Steve Jobs will be following Forstall out the door is too simplistic and wrong, he said. Skeuomorphism is much more than visual — like the “linen” background texture on the iPhone or the gradients applied to the new iTunes icon. There’s also the skeuomorphic animations in an OS: page turns, slide to unlock, etc.

“I don’t think skeuomorphism is bad at all. We need that [animations] to interact with devices in a human way. Gaudy textures are just a visual design problem … I hope they tone it down.”

The tip of the iceberg

He’s going to be focusing on Letterpress for a while, and “use it as a testbed for more stuff.” But as for what’s next…

“I have a thousand half-baked product ideas. I think I’d like to focus more on infrastructure before I actually do those,” he said. “It’s like an iceberg. No one is solving the fundamental problems underneath the surface correctly. I want to give that a crack.”

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Brichter is 27 and already has Apple and Twitter on his resume and has contributed significant, but under-the-radar technology, to both. At Apple he invented a way to browse album covers by one-finger swipe. His next effort after that was a company called Tweetie, where he invented the now-popular pull-to-refresh interface as part of an iPhone Twitter client. Twitter eventually bought that company and made it the official iOS and Mac Twitter client.

He’s now self-employed. His first post-Twitter project, which he started when he left last year, is called Atebits. Letterpress is Atebits’ first iOS game.

The overall design is very spare. The goal is to beat your opponent at composing words based off of a set of tiles. You can take letters from anywhere on the board and use them, but your opponent can steal them from you too. The aim is to have the most letters once all the tiles on the board have been used. Players can have multiple games going at the same time, similar to Words with Friends.

His inspiration for the game? He and his wife were playing an iPhone game while waiting for a table for dinner and wanted a simple game they could play against each other, he told the Verge. Sure, most people would open up the App Store and start searching for one. But Brichter, being an iOS developer, decided to build one instead.

The game is free (but has additional features available through a 99 cent in-app purchase) and available starting Wednesday for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

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