[shock-value]

> The presumption, I think, is that users will scroll to read previous messages and the contrast will be fine where they are reading.

That's a wrong-headed and frankly stupid presumption on Apple's part, if true. You're arguing to make the top half of the messages screen unreadable (or at least more difficult to read) in the name of a gimmicky gradient effect?

> If you really think Apple hasn't considered the idea that some photos will have lighter colors I don't know what to tell you.

They haven't in the beta. Unless you set the image to be basically all white (in which the overlaying text turns black) the text remains white. Even on the default "live" teal background the text is hard to read. Hopefully this will change in the release, but considering promo shots show the lock screen as it is now, I'm not hopeful.

> If you want to criticize iOS 7 you can do better than conjuring up things that would only be true if Apple literally had zero design skills.

Wait, so you are saying that if Apple didn't employ "good" designers, his criticisms about the new UI would be valid, but since they do, his criticisms are baseless? Please go ahead and defend that logic, should be good for a laugh.

[gfodor]

My issue is the OP fails to realize design is about tradeoffs, and points out where the new design sucks and where the old design is better, but shows his hand by not considering why the new design may be better. ("arguably looking better", what does this mean? Why does it look better? Perhaps there is a functional purpose to it that he/she is overlooking?)

The new message UI is obviously trying to fade out the older messages since, if you assume the latest message is the most important content by a large margin, older messages are a distraction. I am not going to say this is a wise design, but the blindness the OP has to this dynamic shows they are firmly in the "Apple are idiots" camp, without an attempt to see what is actually in front of them: tradeoffs.

As far as the white on white issue, it's obviously a bug or to-do. Mark this post, I will eat my hat if iOS 7 ships and there are cases where you end up being unable to read text upon user-defined backgrounds like the home screen or lock screen due to some obvious issue like light text on light background.

[shock-value]

Just regarding the message UI...

First off, I don't think they are explicitly trying to fade out older messages. The received message bubbles are gray and don't seem to have a gradient effect going on; it's only the sent ones which are colored (green or blue) and have the gradient. So I think Apple's goal here really was just a gimmicky gradient effect for the colored (sent) messages.

More evidence for that is that the bubbles themselves don't seem to change colors as you scroll; rather they are just sort of a mask for an underlying gradient layer underneath (so you can have one large bubble which fills the screen and is light on top and dark on the bottom).

But even if their intention was to make older messages fade out, it was still severely misguided. It is trivial to discern which messages are older (they are higher in the chain and therefore further from the text input for a new message). Users of iOS have been familiar with this for years (and isn't the new UI supposed to move away from explicit visual cues since the assumption is people are used to it by now?).

Moreover, it actually hurts usability, since users now have to scroll more often to get messages in the readable portion of the screen if they want to read through a conversation.

And, on top of all that, if there is only one sent message in the conversation, there is actually no way to bring it into the readable portion of the screen due to the snap-back! (Further evidence that this was intended to be no more than a visual gimmick.)