Jony Ive is famous for sleek, minimalistic designs of Apple products. But will he be able to transform the Human Interface (as Apple now calls it’s UI) after so many years of stitched leather and paper? And should he? Right now iOS is the only mobile OS that didn’t simplify their UI. Android went from gradients and odd looking fonts to solid buttons and Roboto font. Windows 8 introduced outlines and Segoe, while Apple is still stuck on gradients, overlays, inner and outer shadows and large and bulky helvetica neue bold. Right now because of that exact Skeumorphism Apple stands out from the rest a bit more. If we simplify it by removing the gradients and making the buttons less “button’y” it’ll start looking either like Win8, or Android.

Apple chose a very bad time to make those changes after so many years of life-like UI’s. Why? Because if they do it now, after everyone else went purely digital, they’d be accused of stealing ideas and being “behind”.

My bet is that it won’t go as far as Android or Windows Phone in simplicity, but we might see the gradients removed (while keeping the shadows, and maybe a little noise). Also I think mr. Ive might go for a better consistency across all the apps, because right now iOS is a mess – every app has a slightly different looking UI, not really fitting together with the rest of the OS. If it gets a little bit simpler visually and more unified, the experience will be better without copying Android or Windows Phone.
I seriously hope that we’ll see a change, because as a designer I’m a bit upset with Apple’s current direction. Taking the button metaphor as an example – I think iOS buttons are less refined than Android’s and WP8’s.

But of course we just have to wait and see what comes next with iOS7.