iOS 7 landed and the leather is gone. The stitching, the felt, the little shadows under everything that pretended a screen was a desk. Skeuomorphism is over, and the field didn't really argue about it. It just changed.
My honest first reaction was relief. There's something a little dishonest about a calendar that pretends to be a leather diary, and I never quite trusted it. A screen is a screen. Admitting that felt like a kind of maturity.
My second reaction, which arrived about a fortnight later, was worry. Because in stripping the fakery we also stripped the cues. Those shadows and edges weren't only decoration. They told you what could be pressed. Remove them all and you get a beautiful surface where nothing announces itself, and people quietly stop knowing what to touch.
So we'll overcorrect, the way we usually do. The pendulum has swung hard, and it will swing back, and somewhere in the middle we'll rediscover that a button ought to look like a button, without needing to look like it was cut from a saddle.
What stays with me isn't the style. It's how fast a whole trade changed its mind because one company did. I keep sitting with that. We like to think of ourselves as independent, and then we repaint the house the moment the neighbour does. I include myself in that.