Speaking of Jared Sinclair he has a blog post up today about the wasted year iOS 7 brought on developers:
Fast-forwarding a year, the effect that iOS 7 has had on third party development is disheartening — which sounds like a fatuous thing to say, since there have been so many well-liked redesigns over the past year. But that’s the rub: the vast majority of third-party developers’ time has been spent redesigning and reimplementing apps to dress the part for iOS 7.
The one thing iOS 7 seems to have done, though, is to bring easy money to many developers who hit a wall with improving their app(s). That is: redesign for iOS 7 and sell the app as new. That was a pretty common, if contentious, theme for this past year.
That said, while I agree iOS 7 redesigns were a set back, I have less empathy for this complaint. iOS 6 looked old, iOS 7, or a redesign in general was needed if the platform was to continue to be successful. So on the one hand you can look at this as a setback, or a reboot. On the other you can look at it like the shift from PowerPC to Intel on Macs — annoying but necessary for long term health of the platform. (Or if you prefer the shift to the taller iPhone format. Or retina displays. Or…)