The man responsible for iOS 26, the worst usability regression in Apple history, has jumped ship for Meta, and presumably taken top minions with him.
Alan Dye, whose background before becoming Apple’s software interface design exec was brand design and print advertising, about as far from human computer interface work as you could find in the design space.
iOS 26’s and the even less well thought out MacOS 26 Tahoe interfaces have been ridiculed by many for terrible legibility from Dye’s widespread use of transparency effects. It was so bad that the core feature of the design called “Liquid Glass” was quickly amended with a user preference for a “Tinted Glass” that returned some legibility to the interface.
Dye doesn’t understand interface design and his work at Apple regressed their UI progress by more than a decade. He wasn’t even liked or trusted at Apple and had a terrible reputation across the broader interface design community. Apple blogger John Gruber had this to say of him.
It’s rather extraordinary in today’s hyper-partisan world that there’s nearly universal agreement amongst actual practitioners of user-interface design that Alan Dye is a fraud who led the company deeply astray.
A fraud. Let that sink in. Apple, renowned for its user interfaces for more than half a century, put a man who widely considered a fraud in charge of user interface. And though it was former Apple VP of industrial design, Jony Ive, that put Dye in charge, Tim Cook is ultimately responsible.
Tim Cook has been terrible for Apple customers. His product instincts are worse than useless, the 10 years and $30B blown on his utterly failed attempt at a product legacy, the Vision Pro VR goggles, is as clear an indication of that as any. But many critics at least gave him credit for building a solid team. That was misplaced. Most of Cook’s deputies over the last 15 years have been pushed out or left willingly after spectacular failures, across nearly every part of the business from AI to design to retail to Siri and search.
Tim Cook’s only customer for his entire tenure at Apple is Wall St. Steve Jobs’ supply chain expert, Cook has inverted Apple’s approach, molding existing products to more closely fit Apple’s supply chain rather than managing suppliers to support new and innovative products.
Tim Cook doesn’t give a shit about users, only that Wall St. is happy. Cook has been great for investors, terrible for customers. At least today we can find some comfort that another one of his failures, Alan Dye, is no longer around to wreak havoc on even more of SJ’s products and legacy.
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