Apple’s iOS 7 rolls out today, shares gained

Today Apple is supposed to roll out the biggest changes to its iPhone software since the smartphone was launched six years ago, hoping to avoid a repeat of the outcry against last year’s update to iOS.

“Soon, were going to witness an event really almost unprecedented in our industry, when virtually overnight hundreds of millions of people download iOS 7,” Apples Senior VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said in a conference last week.

In last year’s operating system update the iPhone maker removed Google’s Maps app and replaced it with Apple’s own flawed rival, eventually prompting an apology from chief executive Tim Cook.

Yet this year’s update is even more radical, with a new overall look and feel, prompting some to predict a backlash, at least initially. Design chief Sir Jonathan Ive unveiled iOS 7 in June at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, promising that the first product of his expanded role in charge of software’s “human interface” would be “completely new” but still “instantly familiar”.

All-new icons, fonts and colors, in an interface stripped of ornamentation such as textures and shadows, would create a sense of “depth and vitality”, he said, making iOS 7 “unobtrusive and deferential” to the user’s own apps and content.

The response among developers and designers outside Apple given early access for private testing was mixed: some praised it while others panicked. This week, millions of people will follow Apple’s invitation to download this free update to their iPhone’s software, and many are predicting the same response – but highly amplified.

“My first reaction was a mixture of shock and denial,” says Gentry Underwood, designer and co-founder of Mailbox, an email app bought by Dropbox for a reported $100 million earlier this year. “I bitched and moaned and was pretty angry.”

After the beta was improved and bugs were fixed, he was won over to the simple design, smooth animations and lightweight feel, and is redesigning Mailbox to fit the new look.

An area of possible confusion among iPhone users is iOS 7’s new touchscreen gestures used to move within and between apps, which do away with design flourishes that mimic physical buttons. It’s a move that some have compared to the way buttons and badges on 1990s websites gave way to simple text links for navigation. However, some designers worry that many people won’t understand which words they can tap to make a change, and which they can’t.

Tom Boates, vice-president of user experience at fitness app Runkeeper, says these changes by Apple resemble Microsoft’s Windows Phone, which was popular with some early adopters but has failed to win over the public.

Company shares gained yesterday, preparing for the release today which was long expected. Shares of Apple have slumped since the issue of 5S and 5C models of iPhone due to the unexpectedly high pricing of cheaper 5C model.