323: The Tidal Wave

Welcome to Under the Radar, a show about independent iOS app development. I'm Marco Arment. And I'm David Smith. Under the Radar is usually not longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started. So this week, I wanted to talk about the... The kind of adoption curve of liquid glass, as we're going through the summer now, we're well into it. We're at beta three. We're really moving along now.

There's a couple of things that I think are worth considering as I've been diving into this and, of course, as you've been diving into this with your app redesigns. Two major kind of themes. Number one is that the design itself...

is changing and evolving as we are doing this. As we are trying to design for it, the design is changing. And so there's some interesting dynamics and considerations there. And then I've also, you know, once... kind of sentiment I've seen around is as people have used this design more or it's sat with people more,

There's a lot of controversy over parts of it. It's not universally liked. Some people think it's bad in certain ways, and honestly, it is bad in certain ways, but it's also great in other ways. There's always been a strong...

Kind of motivation for developers to adopt Apple's look and feel by default. You know, it was always like, well, if you want to have something, you know, more custom, you can, you can theme it yourself. You can build it up, you know, into your own custom stuff. But ideally you should use Apple's defaults.

If you don't really know, like rules of grammar, it's like don't break the rules until you know the rules. And so you should really use Apple stuff most of the time. And with liquid glass and this redesign,

Apple has set a pretty strong opinion forward for I think for the first time in a while. They said a really strong opinion forward of this is how apps should look. And if you look around the system, there's a couple of, you know, kind of. I would almost say templates. You know, you have like the tab bar structure and many, many apps now have the tab bar structure. Then you have kind of like, you know, like the full screen with control blobs in the corners. Like, you know, there's.

They have certain templates and there's not very many of them. The conventional wisdom of like, you should follow these probably. I think it's worth diving into. when you should follow them when you should not follow them and how you choose if you're going to follow them which ones to follow oh sure and i think it's probably an interesting conversation just in the sense of like i so i've basically finished

My Pedometer++ first draft redesign at this point. I've gone through the entire app. Every screen of it now has been liquid-glassified and updated and adjusted to it. And my process for that has been very much...

I look for inspiration on the system apps for any question I have. And my first draft approach has been to copy, to some degree, the... apple approach and i think that's motivated largely from this position of like i don't have time to invent something novel and interesting that will fit in with the new design pattern in the next few weeks. Like I was doing the math today and it was sort of slightly terrifying me that I think I have basically seven working weeks left of the summer.

to to to get things done and with a little bit of holiday in there so maybe closer to six weeks of actual working time like i don't have time to be re to be wildly doing the sort of the speculative exploratory

prototyping lots of different ideas and things. It's like I'm taking the approach of saying, you know, if an Apple version of this exists, I'm going to try and copy that because they've had the benefit of rather than trying to do this in eight weeks, they're doing it, you know, they've had at least...

a couple of years probably that they've been iterating and trying different things. And so if they've settled on a pattern, that's probably going to be good enough for me. But it is definitely tricky because I'm, you know, no app that I, it's like, if no app that I,

that, you know, part of my app is exactly the same as one of Apple's apps. You know, the closer, like a lot of pedometer screens are very maps oriented. And so those, I can look at Apple Maps and... to draw inspiration, but I'm still having to interpret that and... find ways in which that applies to me that is different than it applies to a general purpose navigation tool that isn't hiking specific and doesn't have all the other features and the benefits.

And so it's interpretation, but it's still kind of – I have to make guesses about that. And I think we are – And depending on how closely you can find something that exists, then you can do that interpretation. But often there's the question you're asking in some ways of when should you try and follow that? Why should you try and do something different? And I think the other question of it's like, what are you doing?

too, if there is, you know, you have a feature or a screen or something for which there is no example. And even there, like within Apple's apps, not all of them do the same screen the same way with the same look or the same structure. There's variety between those. not as straightforward as even just copying something you you have to individually kind of decide and you're doing this all with such limited experience with the new design and the new designs changing all the time and so

Yeah, it's complicated. It's not straightforward. And I think my hope right now is just like I'm taking this approach of I'm viewing my early designs as first drafts. I'm going to try and go through my apps, get a draft implementation of a very straightforward version of something.

And then my hope is that sort of I'll be able to loop back to those towards the end of the summer when hopefully the betas have settled down. I'll feel confident to have the – once we get into the public beta phase, I'll probably be at that point putting it on my – phone so I can be living in it day in and day out rather than now. It's only on a testing phone for me because I'm trying to be wise about that and don't want to completely destroy my new phone. Every time I pick up my...

My testing phone, just as an aside, it is always hot. I don't know why. It's doing nothing. It's just sitting on my desk. It is always hot. So I'm like... This is not great. So I haven't quite gotten to the point where I can live with it full-time, day-to-day. And so it's a really awkward place. It's like I'm copying, but I'm not fully copying, and I'm trying to read.

there's like three WDC videos, like the introduction to liquid glass, the making a Swift UI app with liquid glass. Um, and there's another technical one about the design that I've just probably watched like five times. I'm reading the human interface guidelines all the time. Like I'm just trying to,

amess myself into this is like, how quickly can I speed run an understanding of this? But in the absence of understanding, all I have is copying, which is not the strongest position to be in as a designer. I think it's also very obvious that Apple themselves are also speed running this to some degree. Like, that this is, you know, this is very much a, you know, it's coming in hot.

They did not have a lot of time to massively refine many of the elements of it. The system itself is kind of a mess with bugginess. I will say, though, for developers, especially for...

If you are in charge of the design of how the app looks and works and functions and is structured, I think the time is now for you to put the beta on your phone, on your main phone. Betas 1 and 2 were terrible. Beta 3 is... basically fine like it's not without problems but betas one and two were very very bad and beta three they really have fixed most of the very badness of it including the intense heat But yeah, I would say the time is now because this is...

It's such a change. And the more you are using it on your carry phone, the more you will get the design. You will understand, you know, what is what are the because you'll see it. When it's on a test phone, for me personally, when it's on a test phone, I don't get anything out of that. Because I don't really do anything on the test phone. So I don't really experience the new OS when it's just on a test device. When it's on your main device...

you are seeing so many different nooks and crannies of that design. You're seeing like, you know, how does it work? Not only in, you know, the kind of headlining apps. Mail, music, you know, like the big system, you know, Safari, you can see that on a test phone, you know, if you poke around here or there. But when it's in your main phone, you're seeing things like, how does the alarm look?

How does it work with the control panels and the settings apps? How does this random weather widget that I... There's so many little things, little edges of the system that you will just not see on a test device unless you are... An amazing QA person who can poke around like that, which I cannot. So this is the time because to really understand which of these interaction paradigms and which of these kind of Apple templates, so to speak.

Which of these makes sense for your app? I think you need to experience some time using all of them. And the best way to do that is to use it on your main phone because you'll be forced to. And Beta 3...

I wouldn't recommend this for civilians, but for developers, it's fine. It's good enough for developers. So that being said, I think as I have tried to figure out what do I do for Overcast? Overcast has never had a tab bar. It didn't seem like it made a lot of sense for Overcast because in the past, tab bars have historically been like three to five.

sections that you would tab between um and it tends to it tended to discourage like drilling down into things you know navigationally or showing a lot of modals and what is overcast It's a navigation stack where you drill into things and then a giant modal now playing screen. So it seemed like the wrong pattern. I think it's now the right pattern.

Because the new tab bar, like if you look at Apple's own apps, all of their media apps, look at music, look at podcasts, they use that structure. It's a tab bar. And they've had this cool like, you know. The mini player blob that floats above the tab bar, that's now a system component. You don't have to write it manually, which, oh my God, saves me so much time. Animating the now playing sheet in and out of that.

is two lines of SwiftUI. There's so many little things that become much, much easier if I use that design. Integrating search into it is much, much easier because it's literally built in. So they've made a bunch of things about it much easier. And structurally, I think it works best when there's like two or three tabs at most, you know, plus search. like there's because they've kind of crammed search in

And because it collapses down when you scroll into one button on the left, like there's really not a lot of space or, you know, breathing room there for more tabs. So I'm like, well, if I kind of restructure Overcast into like home. podcasts and explore or something like that you know like you know home podcasts and director you know whatever it is like something like that then that fits pretty well in the tab bar design and i get all those advantages and users will come to expect this is how

media apps work you know most of my users you know it's you might think that my competitors are like you know pocket cast cash or whatever no my competitor my biggest competitors are apple and spotify spotify they're off in the woods who knows what they're doing but apple is very clear with what they are doing like apple podcasts

Looks like that. It's a tab bar. It's very, very simple. It looks just like the music app. And so if I want my customers to feel that this is pretty familiar, I should adopt Apple's. On the other hand... will it look too cookie cutter? Will it look too boring if my app looks exactly like Apple's apps? Like if you make a mail app and it looks just like Apple mail,

Is that bad? Does that take away some things from your app? What if people don't like the system design? And then every podcast app they try looks just like Apple Podcasts. It is a weird, tricky balance, and I don't quite know every time whether I'm making the right call or not, but I think ultimately what I usually end up doing is usually end up... Closer than not to Apple's looks and Apple's structures. And that usually has worked well for me.

Yeah, and I think there's this funny like almost like bet you have to make with a choice like that where you're saying if you try – like in your case, like it is the – It's the very interesting position of like Overcast has a almost not quite feature for feature, but very close to feature for feature existing system app that like has been.

liquid-glassified in the Apple Podcasts app, and to some degree the music app, but definitely the podcast app. There are very few screens or parts of Overcast for which there isn't an analog in some way. in the podcast app and you have this weird bet you have to make of are you're going are you going forward Are you more likely to be getting people – say you're focusing on – say you think of your ideal new user, someone who's coming to Overcast. Are they going to feel comfortable?

If it's similar to the app that they've most recently been using. So they were using Apple Podcasts. They decided they wanted to try something different. They heard about Overcast. They heard it's great. They go and download Overcast. Oh, this is exactly like podcasts, but it's better. Oh, uh...

Your voice boost and smart speed are better for them. They're enjoying that. Great. Or do you make the bet the other way? It's like you're making the – it's like the stock trading where it's like the long or the short position. Are you taking the – short position that people are going to hate the new design in podcasts and you're going to be a breath of fresh air if you go the other way. And I think that tension or like that

sort of the degree to which you're matching. I mean, it's one of those things, and I think so many times I've had to make that kind of a choice in my career as an app developer. And I think... It's easy, I think, to be – to think that the kind of the short position, you look at this, you hear controversy about it or whatever. But it's like betting against the platform, betting against that the –

that Apple is committed to a direction seems broadly to be something that's going to come back to bite you. That it's going to be something that would be more like... At best, if you're the counter alternative to something like that feels very short lived position and not something that's very sustainable and is not something that is like you're fighting against the tooling.

while you do that. The most remarkable thing that's been really nice, actually, has been doing my Pedometer++ redesign. Most of the redesign work that I've been doing is essentially me just deleting code. that I was previously using in iOS 18, I was customizing the system controls and the system styles and doing all these things to kind of like...

you know, bend Swift UI to my will in a way because I had a very, I had a particular mentality that I was trying to do and I was always fighting something or always tweaking something and it was inevitably leading to trouble. The no current version of Pedometer++ uses only system button styles.

uses only system controls except for one. I made a custom segmented controller because you can't tint segmented controllers for some reason. I don't know why. Still? As far as I can tell. As far as I can tell, you can't still tint segmented controls. So I made my own segmented control, but all it's trying to do

It's looking like the system one as much as I can make it, but with tint, because that's the way it looks better in my app, I think. But I've been doing this, and I will say I've been making this process.

very fluid, very straightforward. It took me a lot less time to do the Pedometer++ full redesign than I expected because mostly I'm just saying, you know what? If it's good enough for the system, it's good enough for me and I'm just getting rid of all my custom stuff and it's been really great. And so if... liquid glass goes over great and people are happy about it and my customers are happy, then...

awesome like i'm in the pound seats then like everything's wonderful and um it works well for me and if it goes the other way it's like oh that's awkward but at the same time like if people don't like the new design um like

I guess they're going to go to Android? Because the reality is, even if my app is different and went in a different direction or took a different structure or did a different layout or didn't like the tab bar that collapses and expands or these things that... these system features that are going to be, that the system is pushing you towards using, like that doesn't seem like a great.

place to be. It doesn't feel very sustainable or something that's going to have longevity that I'm just going to be constantly fighting against the tooling rather than just embracing it. as a small you know sort of on the like you think about spotify or someone like that like their whole app is a whole different thing like they're not playing in the and i'm trying to be a really native ios app

They're going in the like, you know, the Spotify app looks the same on the web, on Android, on iOS, on a Mac, like it's the same app. And that's the direction they've gone. And that makes, I think, a lot of sense if you have a very big, broad.

brought up, but I don't think for either, for you or I, it's the opposite. Like we're just on iOS. We've chosen to specialize. This is our world. And so the approach I'm generally taking is to just be like the most iOSified I can possibly be. I want like...

the best example of the new design as I can possibly come up with and just embracing that. And if you do that, I will say it makes your life a lot easier. We are brought to you this episode by Pork Bun, which has been named the number one domain name registrar by USA Today for three years in a row.

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So I think you're touching upon some important themes here. If you want to serve people who don't like the redesign or if you don't like the redesign yourself or both, I feel like you're trying to stand in front of a tidal wave. Like this, when Apple wants to do something, they're going to do it. And we don't, you know, we can basically offer feedback.

Literally, but we can offer feedback and we can try to persuade gently to maybe slightly tweak the direction of things. But when they want to do something big, it's going to happen to us whether we like it or not. you might think like, oh, I'll serve all the people who hate the design. And that might be a market for like a year, maybe. When iOS 7 launched, a lot of people really hated it.

And you could have made a market briefly, you know, being the app that didn't adopt the new design and being all, you know, iOS 60, you could do that. But your app started to look old on day one. And it was. a pretty minimal minimal and marginalized market to appeal to um within maybe a few months at most like it's not it isn't a long-term position to be like anti the system design

unless you are really, really good and have your own really, really good design. And odds are you don't. Like, you might if, you know, God bless you if you're out there, but like... You probably don't. Let's be honest. I know I sure wouldn't. I don't have that kind of design skill, and I think most of us don't. It is much better to embrace the tidal wave that's coming.

Whatever the metaphor is. Jump into it. Jump over it. I forget. But, you know, whatever people do in waves. I should know this. Embrace the wave. Know it's coming. And, you know, try to work with it. Because that's the market. And every single day that goes by after this is released, there's going to be more and more people who just consider this. Yeah, this is what iPhones are like. And if your app doesn't look like that, it's going to look old and or cheap or bad or broken.

I also think when deciding how much of the system look to adopt versus how much to customize, you mentioned that you're stripping out tons of customization and kind of going with system look and a lot of controls and everything. I think in deciding whether to do that, it matters a lot. How strong of an opinion is the system look? How rich is it? How specific or how detailed is the system look? In the era of iOS 7, there was the big stark bomb drop at the beginning.

But over time, it just came to represent less and less. And so the iOS 7 look was kind of no look. Like it was kind of unstyled. It's like the CSS didn't load in your app. That's kind of the iOS 7 look. But the iOS 26 look...

is very opinionated. It's very rich. It's very detailed. The system theme is strong for the first time in a long time. And so the more you deviate from that, I feel like when there is... an unstyled look like ios 7 era look you are kind of left to customize more of it you you're expected to customize more of it and your app will look better the more that you do customize but if if there is a strong

brand new theme like there is now the more you customize and the more you deviate from it it actually might backfire on you it actually might make your app look worse or it might make it look old because you're trying to apply you know last year's design techniques to this year's design, or you are by customizing it, maybe you are stripping away some of the cool default look that people will think is cool for a while.

And I think the time will come in this design era that is kicking off this year, this stage of Apple design. The time will come when more customization will be in fashion and will be advisable. But right now on like minute zero of this design, I think less customization and going into the system design. is the better move because that's what is cool and that's what is new and fresh. And your design trying to compete with that is probably not going to succeed. So if you embrace that design...

you will also be part of the tidal wave that is cool and fresh. And there will be people who will not like it.

But again, those people are going to be marginalized over time because this is what's happening to the platform. You can't go back. And so this is what's here. And it's much easier to embrace it and work with it than to try to fight against it. Yeah. I think there's a funny aspect, too. There's something I was recently thinking about that I am taking advantage of this change.

to shift blame onto Apple for choices I've wanted to make for a while. It's been an interesting part of this process too, that I think this change... is big and meaningful. And I think people are going to interpret it as Apple changed all my apps. This sort of, I think the way that a lot of users are going to sort of react and fair enough, like that is what's happening. Apple is driving this, but as I've been doing some redesigns.

Like I'm not talking about the visual redesign parts where there's some things that I'm trying to be very just sort of built in. But as I'm going through my app screen by screen, which is just a wonderful opportunity to revisit my sort of user experience and information. architecture and all the kind of whatever those designy words you want to use for how the app works. And I'm finding things where it's like, oh.

you know, like a year or two on from when I first built this feature, I think I have a better way to structure this. I think this is confusing. I think this is better. And usually I'm very reluctant to like move things in the app. Because anytime you move anything, it's going to annoy some people. And the trade-off and the balance of that can be really awkward. That's like, is it worth doing this thing in a way that I think is 10% better?

would require shifting a button from one screen to another. And then you have to do the change management of that. You need to use tip kits to tell people where the new button is or however you want to do that. Like it's messy and awkward. But one of the nice things about sort of very embracing the system design.

is a lot of, I think, those kinds of changes that I'm now making. Like I'm moving a bunch of features from one place that didn't really make sense or wasn't really getting used. And I think if I put it somewhere else, it'll be better. Like you can kind of wrap them all up. And I think in some ways it's like you get a...

This is the way I'm viewing it anyway. I feel like I get a little bit of a pass. I get this free pass to fix a bunch of stuff that I should fix in some ways in general, but fixing it would have been awkward.

And it's like if you're going to jumble everything up anyway, and it's going to look very different, and it's all going to be kind of across the system, so it's not just me doing it. It felt like a really good opportunity to do that. And so I think it's been really helpful to embrace the system design. to give cover in some ways to some of these other restructurings and redesigns and things that I'm doing because I think it's going to,

users are going to need to relearn the app regardless. Maybe it's the positive version of this. There's going to be a period where they're going to need to become more acquainted with the app again. As part of that, I have this wonderful opportunity to right the wrongs of two or three years ago when I didn't have the...

the benefit of a couple of years of actual using of the app or further of, you know, the classic one is who you designed a feature with a particular set of features in mind. And then over time you add two or three new features to that area. And then suddenly it just doesn't work. Suddenly your architect, you know, it's like the classic. example of like

you've run out of tabs. And so now you have a hamburger menu, right? Like this situation is something that always happens, but this is a great opportunity to come in and clean that up. Like actually get your design good again, like get back to zero. And then, you know, that feature. creep that design sort of muddlement will naturally happen over time but it's a great opportunity i can encourage everyone to like take the time to think about your app

from a kind of the ground up perspective. And not necessarily that you should be like tearing everything apart, but this is a good opportunity to right the wrongs of the past because you get this little bit of sort of system cover because, you know, Apple made us do it. And so it's a good opportunity in that way.

Yeah. I'd also say like, you know, it's similar to my tab bar example. Like the reason why I'm looking at a tab bar now is that tab bars have massively changed since they previously were. Even simple things like, you know, search is now on the bottom. Everywhere across the whole system. If your search icon or button is on top nav, you are now old and broken.

So you have to move search down. That will change the layout of things. That will change the navigation structure of things. You might change more of the design as part of just doing that. You should, as part of this also, revisit.

old decisions that you made, like again, my decision that tab bars weren't right for overcast. Well, now tab bars are very different and the system is very different and now they are right for overcast. So any assumption you've made along the way, you can challenge that assumption now because the conditions have changed. And again, this is why I think...

I know I shouldn't be advocating this. Put it on your main phone. It's time. Beta 3. Close enough. Just put it on your main phone. You need to understand this design and you need to see all over the system quite how broken your app will feel when you try out all the new ones.

Sure. Or at least I think the current rumor is that the public beta is coming out next week, maybe. So maybe wait till next week, but very soon. Oh, I absolutely agree. Very soon. Yeah, because you want to have it before the public does. Trust me. All right. Fair enough. Thank you for listening, everybody. Good luck with all of this, and we'll talk to you in two weeks. Bye.