Andreas Goeldi, CTO of video marketing company Pixability, has an interesting theory that likens Apple’s iOS 7 to Microsoft’s disastrous Windows Vista release. He says that the moment companies start adding “pointless visual gimmicks” like frosted glass, it shows that it’s running out of ideas.
He puts forward this theory in a post on his personal blog, explaining why he switched to the Galaxy S4 and Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8 tablet from the iPhone and iPad respectively. From his post:
When a technology vendor can’t keep up with the speed of innovation anymore, it resorts to incrementally copying other’s innovations and starts adding pointless visual gimmicks, such as frosted glass effects. Such effects are cool, set your product apart, make it look modern, but unfortunately they are also entirely useless and just consume system resources without really improving the user experience.
[…]A few weeks ago Apple introduced iOS 7, the first major overhaul since the iPhone came out. It has a ton of new features, almost all of which Android users have enjoyed for years.
Goeldi notes that even while he was on iOS, he used a lot of Google services like Gmail, Voice Search and Google Now, Google Maps, Chrome instead of Apple provided defaults, and Android’s tight integration with these services would provide an even better experience. He goes on to add that as smartphones mature in functionality, cloud based services are what become differentiating factors, and Apple clearly has a lot of work to do in this space.
While Goeldi’s main point about switching to Android because of “frosted glass” seems silly at first, does his underlying point about internet services being increasingly important to mobile platforms seem convincing? Is iOS 7 really a sign of “limited innovation” at Apple? Tell us in the comments below.
