The decline of Apple’s leadership in UX design
The iPhone and the MacBook are no longer the gold standard they used to be. Does it matter?
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My Samsung Galaxy S10+ just got a software update. It’s now running the latest version of OneUI, based on Android 10. I haven’t felt so good using a phone since the days of the iPhone 7 Plus. Everything is fast, shiny and gesture-driven. When I change the brightness on my screen, the little “sun” icon rotates on itself. As it does so, its weight changes, becoming bolder and bolder as the brightness goes up:
What’s the big deal, you say? Let’s take a step back, cause there was a time when Android was horrible, Apple ruled the world and you wouldn’t catch me dead without my iPhone. Those days are long gone.
Until five years ago, there was only one choice for a great mobile experience, the iPhone. The same was true for computing (MacBook Air), and let’s not mention tablets. Today, the difference isn’t as clear cut anymore. For the price of an iPhone, and sometimes cheaper, you can get a Samsung or Google device which is just as sleek, user friendly and great at taking photos. If you’re willing to forgo some advanced features like wireless charging, or take a hit on build quality, there are even more choices at a fraction of the price.
The same is true for laptops. The Macbook is still king for sleekness and build quality perhaps, but Windows 10 devices are catching up fast, led above all by first party laptops and tablets from Microsoft and their Surface line. There are Chromebooks too. Once relegated to El Cheapo status and only good for browsing the net, the modern Chromebooks are fast, solid, and can run a ton of Android apps to make up for their otherwise lack of native programs. You can even run Linux in a container, a great option for developers.
Of course, Apple competitors aren’t anything new. Even five years ago there were alternatives to the iPhone and MacBook combo. The only problem is that, frankly, they sucked.
On the phone side, there were two main problems with Android. First, the OS itself was often customized by vendors with their own proprietary skin, often ugly, and second, most apps weren’t as polished as their iOS counterparts. Android phones sometimes were more advanced than the iPhone, as was the case for the Galaxy Note 5, or the S6 Edge+ in the picture above, but the overall experience was terrible.
On the laptop side, ChromeOS was in its infancy and Windows 10 had just come out, replacing an ill received Windows 8. They both had the kinks of a new OS, either missing features or poor stability. People were then left to realistically choose between the robustness and modern design of MacOS, or the oldie-but-goodie Windows 7, with its outdated user experience.
In five short years, a lot has changed. Both Google and Microsoft took a page off Apple’s playbook and started putting an increased focus on user experience. They released modern design guidelines for their respective OSes — Material Design for Android and Fluent Design System for Windows 10 — offering developers a chance to unify the feel of their various apps on target devices. Samsung too, once happy to slap heavy skins on top of Android, shifted to a lighter approach, instead focusing on micro-interactions like the one we saw at the beginning of this article, to delight their users.
Apple, on the other hand, kept a conservative approach to their designs. It carried on iterating on old, proven paradigms. The only significant UX changes coming from Cupertino were the removal of the Home button on both iPhone and iPad, and the introduction of the Touch Bar on the Macbook Pro. The first introduced a number of gestures which initially confused the user, but overall contributed to updating the design of iOS devices to a more modern aesthetic. The second still comes across as a solution in search of a problem.
It feels as if Apple, once a luminary in user-centered design, has strayed away from the road it helped to establish in the technology world.
Innovation for the sake of it
It used to be that Samsung, Google and all the rest were copying Apple, playing catch up all the time. That’s no longer the case, as innovation outside the iOS / macOS ecosystem now happen independently of Apple. Take for instance the evolution of the notch. Android manufacturers moved away from it for a good year already, preferring round or pill-shaped cutouts for the front-facing camera instead.
That’s mostly because Android phones do without Face Unlock — with the exception of the Pixel 4 — but this feature is another problem in itself.
On the surface, Face Unlock looks like Apple doing what it’s doing best, simplifying user interaction. The problem is that there isn’t much to simplify in the first place, at least on a phone.
In order to unlock a device, the user needs to interact with it, either by picking it up, or at least by waking up the screen. In any case, a touch interaction needs to take place. From a UX perspective, simplification means integrating user authentication or biometric recognition in this first action. That’s why the Home button made a lot of sense on the older iPhone. You wake it up by tapping the home button, and your fingerprint is verified. It’s a simple one-step interaction. Face Unlock adds an unnecessary second step.
In terms of UX, the Samsung Galaxy S10e and Sony’s approach on various phones make more sense. The fingerprint scanner is integrated into the power button, itself placed on the side of the phone to maximize screen-to-body ratio. If the user wants to wake the phone, she can just tap this button and instantly both wake and unlock the phone.
This seems to sum up the problem with Apple today. Innovation seems to be an end in itself, rather than a driver for better user experience.
What’s next?
Does this spell the commercial end of Apple? No, not by any stretch of imagination. The company is healthy as their offering goes beyond just hardware, and that’s perhaps the most telling part of the story.
Apple’s Services segment (e.g. Apple Arcade, Apple TV+ and the App Store), is becoming a crucial component of their bottom line. In the past holiday quarter (Q4 2019), Services brought in more revenue for Apple than Mac and iPad combined, although the iPhone segment is still the leading money maker beating the other two individually by a factor of about 3:1 (for those interested in numbers: Services = US$12.5bn, Mac / iPad = US$11.65bn, iPhone = US$33.36bn).
These Services aren’t even tied to Apple hardware. You can play Apple Music on your Amazon Echo device today. Same goes for Apple TV+ shows on the Amazon Fire TV stick and cube.
Apple might be getting ready to shift their focus once again, and take a backseat in the hardware market. Perhaps the iPhone will become the niche device in a sea of Android smartphones, like the Mac was the graphic designer’s PC in a world dominated by IBM compatibles in the 1990s. Maybe they’ll both be replaced by something new, eventually.
One thing is for sure, Samsung’s hardware today is as delightful as Apple’s, and so is Google’s and even Microsoft’s. That might be disappointing for particularly hard-core fans, but it means more people get to experience a delightful UX regardless of their spending power. It’s a democratization of design beyond both brand and price-point.
As devices increasingly become a blank canvas on which to paint the user’s intended use case, that’s not a bad thing. Apple then becomes just a fashion brand like Burberry, not the gold standard that everybody tries to mimic. With that, the risk of poor design decisions becoming the industry norm is also diluted.
In the end, whether there is a market leader in UX design is less important than having a good design practice across the industry. For that, we still need to thank Apple as it created the right environment that made Material design, Fluent Design System, and OneUI possible.
