Apple’s Liquid Glass Threatens Hybrid Apps

Take a step back and think. What do iOS7, Android 5 and Ionic have in common? If you were going to say flat design, you wouldn’t be wrong, but what I was really looking for was a time period — the early 2010s. More specifically, the 2013–2014 period. About 15 years ago, flat design was born, and a couple of years later at least two OS giants decided to adopt it. In 2011, Google signals its intentions with Android 4.0, in September 2013, iOS 7 gets released, and three months later we have Ionic alpha revealed to the world by Drifty Co. The rest is history.

That history however — like it or not — just got changed in a major way. Turns out most of us web and app developers, we were arguing about native vs. hybrid app frameworks, heavily invested in capability comparisons, plugins, benchmarks, dev communities when in fact the only reason hybrid development ever become popular wasn’t the language — Javascript, initially anyway — or the cross-platform productivity boosts or learning curves.

It turns out hybrid apps only ever existed because of flat design. And that flat design is going away now. Bye…