Google Is Moving Its iOS Apps Toward Platform UI Conventions and Away From Material Design ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jeff Verkoeyen runs Google’s design team for products on Apple’s platforms:

So at the beginning of this year, my team began a deep evaluation of what it means to build a hallmark Google experience on Apple platforms by critically evaluating the space of “utility” vs key brand moments, and the components needed to achieve either.

Does a switch really need to be built custom in alignment with a generic design system? Or might it be sufficient to simply use the system solution and move on?

Via Jason Snell who writes:

This is good news. It’s good for Google’s developers, who no longer have to build that custom code. And more importantly, it’s good for people who use Google’s apps on iOS, because with any luck they’ll be updated faster, work better, and feel more like proper iOS apps, not invaders from some other platform.

Good. I hope Google considers this for the apps it ships on other non-Google platforms, too.

Update: I keep thinking about this tweet in Verkoeyen’s thread:

It’s now been almost ten years now since we set out on this journey, and many of the gaps MDC [Material Design Components] had filled have since been filled by UIKit — often in ways that result in much tighter integrations with the OS than what we can reasonably achieve via custom solutions.

I would love to know what specifically has changed in UIKit that would only now make it possible to build Google’s apps with native components, compared to many years ago.