In iOS, Google says it will abandon material design in favor of Apple's UIKit

For its iOS applications, Google is phasing out the usage of Material Design user interface components in favor of Apple’s own UIKit. The transition should result in less work for Google’s iOS development team. But more significantly, it’s probable that Google’s iOS applications will seem less like intruders on Apple devices as a result of the shift. They should appear and feel more like they belong on iOS, rather than following Android’s UI standards.

Jeff Verkoeyen, engineer lead for Google Design on Apple’s platforms, revealed the move on Twitter. If you’re interested, I recommend reading the entire discussion. Although Verkoeyen claims that his team moved the open-source Material components libraries for iOS into maintenance mode early this year. Material Design is a collection of design standards that Google has developed to integrate the appearance and feel of its applications and services across mobile devices, Chrome OS, and the online. It was first launched in 2014 to unify the look and feel for the same.

This year my team shifted the open-source Material components libraries for iOS into maintenance mode. Why?
A …
— Jeff Verkoeyen (@featherless) October 7, 2021

This evolution of how we approach design for Apple platforms has enabled us to marry the best of UIKit with the highlights of Google’s design language.

The result? Many custom components simply aren’t needed anymore. And the ones that are, they now get more attention and focus.
— Jeff Verkoeyen (@featherless) October 7, 2021

The time we’re saving not building custom code is now invested in the long tail of UX details that really make products feel great on Apple platforms. To paraphrase Lucas Pope, we’re “swimming in a sea of minor things”, and I couldn’t be more excited about this new direction.
— Jeff Verkoeyen (@featherless) October 7, 2021

According to Verkoeyen, Google created its own Material Design components for iOS. But discovered that they slowly drifted farther and further away from Apple platform foundations. Since those fundaments were also developing year after year. Instead of bridging such gaps with its own work, Verkoeyen claims that Google has opted to adopt Apple’s own UIKit for its iOS apps. “This will result in far closer integrations with the OS than we can realistically accomplish with proprietary solutions,” he says.

Many people are reading Verkoeyen’s language in this thread — especially the statement of “tighter integrations” — as indicating that Google’s iOS apps would follow more of Apple’s mobile OS design principles in the future.

“This is fantastic news,” Jason Snell, a long-time Apple writer. It’s excellent for Google’s developers because they won’t have to write that special code anymore. More significantly, it’s beneficial for iOS users who use Google’s applications because, hopefully, they’ll be updated faster, perform better, and feel more like native iOS apps rather than invaders from another platform.”

We won’t know how Google wants to combine the two design principles until it starts upgrading its iOS applications in the coming years. So, let’s hope it does the right thing and simply simplifies things for users. So, we’ll have to wait and see.

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