With Apple’s big Worldwide Developers Conference quickly approaching, everyone’s focus is on Apple’s iOS7 which is sorely due for a major update, especially with Android and Windows Phone constantly getting better. Even with such importance, according to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, iOS7 is running behind schedule and Apple has had to pull people over from their OS X team.
“What I’ve heard: iOS 7 is running behind, and engineers have been pulled from OS X 10.9 to work on it.”
This isn’t the first time this has happened for Apple, though. In 2007, OS X 10.5 Leopard was delayed due to the relocation of their engineers to the iPhone project. As a result, the iPhone made it to market on time but Leopard was pushed back 4 months which is what I can see happening this time too.
Apple’s new iOS VP Jony Ive is apparently pushing iOS to a more modern, “flat design” (read: like Android). Of course having significant design changes would take more time to work on compared to the typical iOS update, and recent personnel changes wouldn’t help with that either.
Android is evolving significantly faster than iOS and with each update iPhone users are switching over to Android more and more while they laugh at their old buddies that are still iPhone users. For a while Android used to be the laughing stock of the mobile world, suffering from an ugly interface and significant lag if you didn’t have a top tier device so Apple slacked off a bit, but that has all changed since 4.0, it’s now silky smooth on most devices and the interface is beautiful with more features and customization capable than what is in iOS. iOS needs to catch up. Badly.
So let’s hope that they can push this new iOS out on time and not delay OS X 10.9 too much either.
