The rise and fall of skeuomorphism

Why the iPhone needed to make things look like things

BY iOS 7, WE DIDN’T NEED THE BUTTONS TO LOOK LIKE ACTUAL BUTTONS ANY MORE

Although Apple’s use of skeuomorphism — making computer things look like real things — peaked in the 2000s, it was there from the first GUIs. The trash can is skeuomorphic, as are folders and Stickies. But where macOS flirted with skeuomorphism, the iPhone was up the skeuomorphic tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g.

There was a good reason for that. Steve Jobs wanted the iPhone to be friendly and familiar. A button would quite obviously be a button; a switch would quite obviously be a switch.

What Apple was doing with iOS is what the Mac had done for computers; to make them feel less complex, to make them more welcoming. On the Mac that meant a mouse, folders and menus, which was pretty good given the limitations of the hardware. On the iPhone it meant using that touchscreen display to mimic real–life things with how they looked and worked.

LIFELIKE TO FLAT

It was a successful strategy. The iPhone was the phone everyone could use, something that couldn’t be said about some of the Microsoft phones or Blackberries. You rarely had to wonder, “what does this button do?”: on the iPhone, the interface made everything’s function obvious. Not everyone liked it. In fact, the developer James Higgs called it “horrific, dishonest, and childish crap” and similar sentiments were expressed by many others — but by the time Apple abandoned skeuomorphism in iOS, its iPhone sales had skyrocketed from 1.4 million to 150 million a year.

Apple’s love affair with skeuomorphism lasted until 2013, with the release of iOS 7. That was the most significant and dramatic iOS interface change since the iPhone’s first launch, dropping the most lifelike designs in favor of something much flatter. And it arguably wouldn’t have happened if the skeuomorphism of previous releases hadn’t been so successful.

By the time of iOS 7, we’d had 12 years of iPhones; we didn’t need the buttons of the Calculator to look like actual buttons, or for Notes to be banana yellow, or for Game Center to look like the varnished wood and green baize of a casino table. Many of the apps were still skeuomorphic because they worked just like their real–world equivalents, such as calculators. But from iOS 7 onwards, they didn’t have to look exactly like their inspiration any more.