Thread by @tolmasky

I think the @AppStore may represent a “Closing of the Frontier” moment (in the American history “Frontier Thesis" sense) that may in part explain the dramatic slowdown in UI and UX innovation in iOS (and even more so in iPadOS) following the iPhone’s initial dramatic launch. 1/🧵

It's no secret that macOS has… borrowed many of its now familiar workflows from 3rd party devs. Spotlight (Watson and QuickSilver), Widgets (Konfabulator), and iCloud Drive (Dropbox) to name just a few. And to be clear, this a good thing and has generally been wll received. 2/🧵

The key thing here is that these utilities started on the "fringe"... the frontier. They weren't shrinkwrap software you bought at Fry's like Microsoft Word, and they weren't installed by the same crowd that installed any old shareware game either. 3/🧵

By and large, these utilities were only installed by pro users & enthusiasts "in the know.” Only a small amount ever broke into mainstream. And if they did, it served as a signal to Apple that it was a worthwhile feature to copy. We even had a word for it: being Sherlocked! 4/🧵

In many ways, these 3rd party utilities followed a similar pattern to the acquisition cycle in Silicon Valley: little companies try a lot of risky ideas & the best get absorbed (purchased in SV's case, copied in Apple's). Crucially, this *derisks* innovation in an ecosystem. 5/🧵

Now, on iOS we've seen *hints* of this, but largely limited to the app layer. The best example of this is of course pull-to-refresh, an interaction that you'd be forgiven for assuming existed since the first iOS, but was actually invented by @lorenb for the Tweetie app. 6/🧵

The central "iOS experience" however (namely, Springboard, the first thing you interact with on the phone), has changed very little. The biggest change to app organization in the last 10 years is "App Library," which brought us the innovation of shoving things under a rug. 7/🧵

Most of the "big" changes we've gotten in iOS have been largely just catching up to macOS: iOS didn't have copy/paste, then it did. iPadOS ignored the mouse for 10 years, then it added support. These weren't ground-breaking additions by any stretch of the imagination. 8/🧵

And IMO a big reason for that is because there's no "frontier" for enthusiasts to experiment and possibly break into the mainstream. Innovation can only come from Apple, where changes are riskiest. The ecosystem has no way to derisk through organic growth in the market. 9/🧵

And jailbreaking doesn’t (and can’t) serve this role. It's a big scary binary switch (that is constantly being mitigated by Apple). You can't install "one well known cool system extension." There's either jailbreaking your phone, or not. 10/🧵

And so it's really no surprise that in the space where there is leeway (the app sandbox), Apple has found inspiration and added big UX changes we now take for granted like pull-to-refresh, but has failed to do the same at the system level. 11/🧵

The reality is that while we like to to give credit to Apple for every aspect of the UX on their systems, their best *refinements* come from having a market-driven "UX conversation" with competing ideas — which makes sense, this is how you encourage trying new things. 12/🧵

And I think this idea of a "frontier" is crucial to that: a place where most users don't venture, so you have the freedom to experiment *in the real world*, as opposed to exclusively developing ideas in secret in a sterile lab with zero outside communication. 13/🧵

I think both approaches have their place: ”cutting out the noise" for an iOS 1 level undertaking makes sense. But continuing to (pre-emptively!) silence potentially amazing ideas indefinitely (that you can copy & integrate!) does a disservice to everyone, including Apple. 14/🧵