The latest WWDC featured a session on UI Design that made a very compelling case against building springboard UIs. The cliffs: Users arrange their home screen

The latest WWDC featured a session on UI Design that made a very compelling case against building springboard UIs. The cliffs: Users arrange their home screen personally, so they know where to go. They haven't done that with a custom springboard so skimming is inefficient compared to lists or tab bars. Because they describe functionality which is more generic than specific app identity, giving feature icons the same visual weight as app icons is ill-advised, and users must process the icon before the text, which slows things down.