According to Jeff Verkoeyen, Google’s head of Apple’s platform design, Google is gradually closing the Material Design custom UI for its iOS apps, instead of using UIKit alone. Google’s application suites on iOS and iPadOS, including Gmail, Google Maps, Google Photos, Google Drive, and YouTube, have been using customized user interfaces that reflect the experience on Android for nearly a decade.
The purpose of these Material Design guidelines is to unify software design on desktop, mobile, and the web as much as possible to obtain a consistent experience. Jeff Verkoeyen explained that in the future, Google will switch to Apple’s UIKit, which is the framework for Apple to build interfaces in iPhone and iPad applications. Verhoeven said that in the past, UIKit was not feasible due to the gap of its design language, but its side effect was that it is getting further and further away from the basic principles of the Apple platform because these basic principles are also evolving year by year.
This problem has also been complained about by some users, who believe that using Google’s iOS app provides a harsh and inconsistent experience with other parts of the operating system. With the advent of iOS14, Google believes that UIKit has been improved enough to be widely used in its iOS and iPadOS applications. Beginning in 2021, Google’s Apple platform design team “began to an in-depth evaluation of the significance of building Google’s iconic experience on the Apple platform, and strictly evaluate the distance between utility and brand image, and the components required to achieve both.
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Next, users of Google Application Suite can expect to see fewer custom components in the experience. Elements such as switches, bar graphs, controls, lists, and menus will be changed to Apple’s system design. The result should be Google’s iOS and iPadOS apps look and feel more like a native.
However, Google will still provide some highlights of Google’s design language combined with the essence of UIKit. This new direction will really make the product feel good on the Apple platform, Verkoeyen commented. Google is currently recruiting designers for its Apple development team to facilitate this proactive change.