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by njhaveri 1710 days ago
I think there may be some confusion here. Reading the original tweets from @featherless, I don't see any intent to actually change the end-user design. For example:

> This evolution of how we approach design for Apple platforms has enabled us to marry the best of UIKit with the highlights of Google's design language.

I'm reading this to say that custom UI components will be replaced with UIKit components that will be customized to have Google's design language. But at a high level, the apps will continue to look the same as they currently do.

2 comments

> I'm reading this to say that custom UI components will be replaced with UIKit components that will be customized to have Google's design language. But at a high level, the apps will continue to look the same as they currently do.

Yes, going back to the source Twitter thread I also believe that's the correct conclusion. Jason Snell and Steve Troughton-Smith misinterpreted the deprecation of this Material Design implementation to mean that Google was deprecating the use of the Material Design design language on iOS.

In reality, Google is building a new Material Design implementation on UIKit to get better OS integration and a bunch of capabilities (such as accessibility features) "for free".

Yeah, I don‘t expect a drastic shift, but I would expect some details, like the weird material tap animation, to change for the better. Maybe the youtube app will support all iOS screen sizes with their safe area insets and properly sized toolbars. That‘s the kind of thing that the people who write about apple care about.
Yes, the blogpost (and most of the HN comments here) are completely missing the point. This is just about deprecating a library for implementing material design on iOS, not deprecating the design language itself.

It's possible (likely, even) that parts of the design language will become more iOS-y (for example: I would bet that Material 'action sheets' disappear and get replaced with system-default ones on iOS, this has already happened on Chrome for iOS). But the material design language isn't going away.