Many people were doing flat design before Apple did. Scott Forstall famously loved skeuomorphic interfaces. When Apple Maps-gate got him fired, Jony Ive took ov

Many people were doing flat design before Apple did. Scott Forstall famously loved skeuomorphic interfaces. When Apple Maps-gate got him fired, Jony Ive took over software UX design and commanded that everything be flat to match the hardware aesthetic. Apple’s switch to flat design was purely about internal politics and was disconnected from the external design world which had been using these idioms for quite some time.