kinda looks like those backgrounds Microsoft uses on their mobile apps pictures on the App Store and Google Play

I thought I was going crazy as my phone stopped updating after iOS 18. Then I learned that they are changing the version # to match the years.

This makes me want to get rid of my iPhone even more

I'm aware. Just making a tongue-in-cheek jab.

Did they? MD2 and MD3 look very different from Apple's design languages

That jump at least had a reason, as a bunch of older software checked if they were running on windows 95 or 98 by checking for "windows 9".
And what it actually feels like is the jump from windows 3.1 to 95. Because it's literally the same one.

Win 10 and 11 do also use something like this, though it's more hidden as it's the update numbers - they were yearmonth (1507, 1709) and are now yearhalfofyear - 20H1, 21H2.

Major version numbers are used when stuff changes, and especially when shit breaks. Can the latest OS X 10 run the same software and on the same hardware as the first OS X 10? If not, increase the major number.

What the hell are they thinking

Guess this means Apple has run out of ideas on how to make iPhone better.

What can we do to distract attention away from the fact that we don't have any decent new features?

• "Rename the business unit so we can print new letterheads and business cards?" Our customer don't work here, sir. "Dammit!"
• "Release a new color that nobody wants? How about a light blue that is so close to the regular silver no one can tell?" We did that last year, sir. "Dammit!"
• "Oh, I know: Repeat the year 2000 mistake by naming our OS versions after the current year using only 2 digits. That will never bite us in the ass in the future." Brilliant, sir.

Trick question: null

Honestly, it looks kind of terrible to me. Not to mention how unreadable text is since there's apparently no guaranteed contrast with black text due to the transparent backgrounds. I feel like I'm going crazy with all the random articles praising it.

Google themselves don't really follow material all that closely over their entire product line.

Android 6 was basically the peak of the UI, IMO, the icons were very consistent and nice early material.

In later versions they shrank the icons and stuffed them into circles and started using a horrible color scheme, then they killed blobmoji and started outright copying Apple's hideous emojis with that awful gradient and pseudo-skeumorphic visuals.

I mean... look, I'm genuinely not trying to be a sour asshole, but why did we need this? How is this furthering the development of smartphone tech? It's, like... sure, pretty graphics are nice, but do we really need ray-tracing on our phones? (I know it's not ray-tracing, but you get my point)