If you look at the design guidelines you see a stark difference in the starting point. Apple's [1] guidelines are basically "how to design your stuff to fit we

If you look at the design guidelines you see a stark difference in the starting point. Apple's [1] guidelines are basically "how to design your stuff to fit well with Apple". Google [2] on the other hand tried to create a visual language that was generic and understandable by people of all technical levels (with a focus on the "next billion users," people who are just getting their first computing device), and then open sourced it. 1. https://developer.apple.com/design/ https://developer.apple.com/design/ 2. https://material.io/ https://material.io/