Windows Phone 7 was 2010 and Windows 8 was 2012. iOS 7 was 2013, with macOS 10.10 Yosemite in 2014, and Material Design coming a few months later.

I know it’s fashionable to hate on Apple here on Lemmy but those of us with memories know that Apple was chided on being late to the party, and iOS 6 & Mountain Lion were mocked as being behind the times and overly skeuomorphic.

I remember the felt tables in Game Centre, the tape deck in Podcasts and the linen background in the multitasking switcher and Notification Centre being frequently cited as dated and over-the-top.

You could argue that their influence or trendsetting may have helped to lock in the flat design trend for the next decade, but they under no circumstances “started” it. That’s blatant rewriting of history.

To the contrary they were actually one of the biggest pushers of skeuomorphic interfaces up until Forstall was ousted and Ive took the reins of Software UX. A change that was made because people were mocking the dated skeuomorphic iOS UI and the lack of consistent design language through the OS.