Apple mostly cares about legibility and consistency in icons now, not art. All the new iOS features like tints and liquid glass don't lend themselves well to intricate designs. It's disappointing, but I tend to agree that the skeuomorphic icons are harder to read.
From their icon guidelines:
"Embrace simplicity in your icon design. Simple icons tend to be easiest for people to understand and recognize. An icon with fine visual features might look busy when rendered with system-provided shadows and highlights..."
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
Self plug, but I made an app related to this - it's a conceptual art gallery for app icons. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to remove the functional premise and just let an icon be a decorative symbol. It's called 001 (https://001.graphics)
It feels like Apple did all of this in reverse. They created a new UI system and effects that look like shit with any amount of fine detail, and now suddenly their design guide says "actually fine details are bad for the user". They didn't come up with a good design, they came up with a shader tech demo and had to make a design that works with that new constraint.
Yeah, rendering at smaller sizes is one thing, but icons being made uninterpretable by system provided shadows and highlighting seems like an unforced error.
I disagree with Apple caring about legibility. You can have legibility in simplicity but apple isn't doing that.
Legibility requires contrast, the whole liquid glass transparent background thing kills contrast and thus legibility. Having random noise from the background windows kills legibility.
As for icons specifically - having white semitransparent (vertical gradient) shape on top of brighter color background makes it harder to perceive the shape which is currently only remaining distinguishing feature. Half of them are gray on gray. If you can't recognize the shape while squinting your eyes then it's not a good legible shape for icon.
The Messages/FaceTime is other comments mentioned is one of the best/worst examples of this. In theory shape of camera and speech bubble are unique, but in practice the real difference is very small. They are both similar size elongated blobs. Messages have tiny little triangle in bottom left corner, camera has two notches. Overall and in combination with color choice this makes it harder to recognize the shape. Phone also uses the same color but at least the general shape is significantly different.
It's not all completely bad. The rainbow button strip and darker background for Audio Midi setup in my opinion made it more distinct. The contact icon also improved contrast, but only because old one had very bad contrast.
There are plenty of others where contrast was made worse. For example Time machine, Font book, Clock, Finder.
> Apple mostly cares about legibility and consistency in icons now, not art.
The second-to-oldest one is legible. The word “PAGES” is quite legible. It’s pretty clear what’s going on. In fact, it’s the only one in the entire set where I would look at the icon and quickly recognize what it is and what it’s for. (The one that is one iteration newer is worse because it’s less legible.)
Nobody is mentioning that there’s essentially nowhere you see the icon now without the name (internationalized) unless you’re already familiar with it, and pinned it to a launcher or something.
The first time you see most of them they’re on a page with screenshots and descriptions.
Nobody needs to know what the Word icon is before they know what Word is.
I use a Mac daily, have for years now. I did not recognize that the icon in the article was for "pages" until it came to the icon with the word pages on it.
The icon is horrible and generic and has failed to leave an impression on me over multiple years.
Strangely, the new Preview app icon on iOS is quite skeuomorphic and depicting something almost nobody ever needs to do anymore in the last few decades (looking at small negatives or positives throughly a magnifying glass, or maybe micro documents?)
I don’t feel great about this ruling. Whatever a “reasonable” fee is supposed to mean, Apple will interpret it to some ridiculous amount. Before the ban, they tried to charge 27%
They absolutely will and they will absolutely get away with it. It just won’t be anywhere close to 27%.
There has been craploads of litigation about “Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory” licensing over the last two decades, and fees that are percentages of revenue with no cap have survived and there is no reason to believe any of these legal standards will change.
In fact, I think it’s likely that Apple and Google will team up to create a standards body that defines the method for distributing/installing smartphone apps (because this is now in their best interest, not that I want them to). These standards are going to end up using a bunch of patents that you will have to license on FRAND terms.
Yes, the cost is going to go down. Yes, Epic is going to benefit a lot more than any indie developer. Such is life
Yep, there's no reason to believe the fees will only be a few hundred dollars as Sweeney is saying, Apple will absolutely try to extract as much as possible without being sued again. The zero commissions for external links was the right approach.
I'm not even sure about that. This very ruling shows that Apple blatantly violated the law (the previous ruling) and tried to collect as much fee as possible while the case goes through the system.
And Apple isn't afraid of being sued. As long as they can earn more money in revenue than paying for lawyers, that's a net profit for them. They can certainly afford all of this.
It should be based on the app size, so maybe developers will stop shipping apps with a single feature and one button that takes 700 MB because of random bloated third-party SDKs that aren't even used.
Money makers on the AppStore are games, and games need assets in high definition. Third party SDKs are probably a drop in the bucket in comparison with visual assets.
I don't feel great either, but that's because prices aren't coming down, instead one billion dollar company just keeps more money than another billion (trillion I guess) dollar company, and we've lost some convenience features that Apple maintained, without any gain.
This is not only affects Epic. Basically any other app, game or SaaS developer can now earn more money because payment processing costing them 1-3% instead of 30%.
And small companies are hit by 30% platform tax the most. More money for small compsnies mean more competition.
For starters, small companies are paying 15%, not 30%.
I'm also not sure where a small company can find a payment processor that will only charge 1%. Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction.
If you have a $4.99 in-app purchase that will cost you 44 cents per transaction to use Stripe vs 75 cents to use Apple's IAP.
But Stripe does not act as a merchant of record so you are responsible for remitting sales tax yourself. Registering for and remitting sales tax in every jurisdiction where you have nexus adds huge administrative overhead to a small company.
If you want to avoid this overhead, Paddle will act as a merchant of record for you, but then you're paying 5% plus 50 cents which adds up to 75 cents on a $4.99 purchase anyway.
Taken all together, depending on their pricing structure, small companies may very well be financially better off sticking with IAP rather than linking to external payments anyway.
When talking in the grand scheme of this case, the 15% arose out of these proceedings. It was 30 back on in 2018.
But yes, overall most people will stick with Apple regardless. I still see it as a win that companies who want to put the work in to go around apple can. That simply seems reasonable in my eyes.
> When talking in the grand scheme of this case, the 15% arose out of these proceedings. It was 30 back on in 2018.
I'm not sure about the timeline, but in general the reduction to 15% for small developers was due to market signals as much as it was anything else. Both Apple and Google need small developers to continue to create new apps and if the 30% is onerous to small developers (which I think it probably is) they'll lower it to attract more products and services.
> But yes, overall most people will stick with Apple regardless. I still see it as a win that companies who want to put the work in to go around apple can. That simply seems reasonable in my eyes
When you think about it, there's maybe half a dozen companies that truly could put in similar work to Apple or Google in creating and maintaining these stores and platforms at the scale and with the features and security that they have built. Most people are going to stick with Apple and Google, except when one of those large competitors like Meta decides to bypass those stores and create its own and continue to nudge folks to their store for various features or downloads or whatever. It introduces friction for no obvious benefit to customers.
You can argue that 3rd party app stores will be more permissive in what they allow, but most of the things that people complain about "scary surveillance" or other onerous regulations for example have to also be followed by any legitimate App Store. So all you've really done is create worse versions of the Apple or Google App Store that siphon away applications. It reduces the profit margins of Apple or Google but it doesn't benefit customers.
I've always wanted to do some small business, maybe an app but to get started feels so daunting. This information you provided is great and makes me feel like there's room to know more.
Are there any good places to grow this kind of knowledge?
How to use payment processors?
How to actually setup a business and get paid yourself?
I don't want to get into the whole founder ethos, I just want to make something and get paid for it.
I think app icons are an underrated artistic format, but they’ve only been used for product logos. I made 001 to explore the idea of turning them into an open-ended creative canvas. There are 99 “exhibit spaces” in the gallery, and artists can claim an exhibit to install art within. Visitors purchase limited-edition copies of pieces to display as the app’s icon, the art’s native format.
It’s a real-money marketplace too - the app makes money by taking commission of sales (Not crypto). I like economic simulation games and I think the constraints here could be interesting.
I’m currently looking for artists to exhibit in the gallery, if anyone is interested, or knows someone who may be, please let me know!
This is a really cool idea. So the pieces that are on display are able to be bought and used as the icon to the app? I think I get what you mean but I'm not sure. And these are... not NFTs right?
iOS default animation speed is 350 ms, at least for SwiftUI. This has always felt a bit too slow. And recent system animation changes felt gratuitous to me (opening the action bar on iMessage for example).
OTOH this article is basically downstream of Apple’s interface design philosophy.
Why do we still have to write `catch let error as SystemError`? Why can't the error be inferred to have the type thrown by the function? I've always found swift's error handling syntax to be awkward
switch error {
case .emptyName:
print("You've submitted an empty name!")
case .nameTooShort(let nameLength):
print("The submitted name is too short!")
}
I'd say in response that he's missing (or, at least, gestures towards but doesn't explore) an element of post-modernism - at least in literary criticism, which I know more about than specifically film - which is that it's inherently a critique of power relationships. The key post-modern observation is that all narratives are deliberately constructed - in other words, someone chooses what to include and what to leave out - so Who tells a story, and Why they tell that story in that particular way, in order to advance What view of the world is instrinsic to understanding them.
Maybe we - artists, critics, and audiences alike - are generally exhausted by that right now. Politics are particularly fraught, and decades of post-modern art and thought certainly can't claim to have advanced utopia, so what we're calling meta-modernism is certainly a response, but it's closer to (my generation's rallying cry) "whatever, man", than it is advancing a solution to anything we see ailing the world at the moment.
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