I’m gonna say it. The only people who shit on “skeuomorphism” or rich design in software are people who didn’t know how to do it or work with it.
The aesthetic with gradients, shadows, highlights, *color*, shading— it all worked well. It’s just not something everyone could do.
*That* is why it disappeared. To make it easier for everyone to make apps that looked “default.”
Not because it’s better this way.
I think that when visual design became simpler, the quality of the UI also got worse. When you don’t need to work hard to create a detailed design, you also don’t tend to work as hard on the UI.
Remember when developers used to spend a lot of time polishing their apps? They made sure the tappable area of every button was at least 44 by 44 pixels, even if they looked smaller. Because these buttons are so small, your finger covers them when you tap. So, some developers even made the buttons glow when you tap them. Now, people just use 20-pixel buttons without thinking.
Also, what happened to manually hinting icons (to ensure smaller icons still appear sharp), instead of using SF Symbols for everything? What happened to using custom fonts and typography, instead of using San Francisco for everything? What happened to sweating over the scroll performance of every UITableView?
(Sidenote: When I searched for “hinting icons”, Google and DuckDuckGo both asked me if I was searching for “hunting icons” instead. The search results are all about icons for hints, like lightbulbs. When I narrowed it down to “pixel hinting icons”, the articles were all from 10 years ago. Hinting icons is truly a lost art.)
I think this is a side effect of iOS becoming mainstream. The design of Mac OS X and early iOS was good because they had a smaller user base. Most people don’t care about design. So, when more people switched to iOS, they voted with their wallets and the developers who paid attention to details lost out.