> Flat design emerged when users had internalized touch interactions and no longer needed heavy visual scaffolding.
Huh. I always took the move, which I seem to recall as being led by the Google Material folks, as a strategic move to kneecap Apple's huge graphics advantage on iPhones. Apple's hardware could actually execute aesthetically pleasing "real world" things on screen (shadows, blurs, etc). Whereas the ragtag hoard of Android devices, had only a few devices that could draw pretty things, and at large power consumption. It seemed a genius move that suddenly a gestalt of "uh, let's all just work with squares of color, ya know, like construction paper" emerged out of Google as "the new cool." It was marketed well, and the "eye candy space" had saturated, so Apple was forced to "catch up" after holding out for a few years.
Huh. I always took the move, which I seem to recall as being led by the Google Material folks, as a strategic move to kneecap Apple's huge graphics advantage on iPhones. Apple's hardware could actually execute aesthetically pleasing "real world" things on screen (shadows, blurs, etc). Whereas the ragtag hoard of Android devices, had only a few devices that could draw pretty things, and at large power consumption. It seemed a genius move that suddenly a gestalt of "uh, let's all just work with squares of color, ya know, like construction paper" emerged out of Google as "the new cool." It was marketed well, and the "eye candy space" had saturated, so Apple was forced to "catch up" after holding out for a few years.