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Comment by mlchild | Hacker News Reader

People's reactions to this announcement are overly focused on Forstall's assumed support for heavy skeumorphism (and their excitement at his departure as lead proponent). I think his record as head of iOS since its inception is a much more salient issue.

Forstall led development of the fastest-growing, most popular computing platform of the past decade or so with, to be sure, a few notable screw-ups, but mostly incredible innovation and efficiency. While his departure does sound like the result of a power struggle that needed to be resolved, I really believe we're shortchanging his incredible achievements. Forstall's departure is not unequivocally or even clearly a victory for those who are firm believers in iOS and its ecosystem going forward. The only reasonable reaction is that we'll have to wait and see.

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When iOS was new, it was incredible. But it's mostly failed to evolve since then. There have been a few minor improvements over the years, but Springboard in particular feels really old, especially for the iPad. And many of the first-party apps are poor.

Apple has succeeded in the mobile market largely because of their excellent hardware and their app ecosystem. But iOS itself is a little disappointing. It's due for a major evolution, not just more incremental tweaking.

The thing about Forstall's achievements is he did them all under the shadow of Steve Jobs.

Is it that he had to take a more active role now, and not just be a Jobs man?

Is it that Jobs could bring talented people together and keep them there and Tim Cook is failing to do that?

I'm almost certain it's neither of those, but they serve to illustrate the point: when people think of iOS, Scott Forstall is not even close to the first person they think of giving credit to.

I agree that probably neither or those explanations is fully true, but I do believe that Jobs had the ability to harness conflicting personalities towards greater goals.

I do disagree with your last point, though —— I've watched every keynote for the past 6-7 years and Forstall has rocked the iOS presentations. Perhaps I'm biased, but I very deeply associate him with the greatness of iOS, particularly Apple's ability to steadily pick off the "low-hanging fruit" features (e.g. 3rd party apps in 2.0, copy-and-paste, PC-free) with regularity and elegance.

Forstall did a great job bringing Mac OS X and its Core Technologies to a mobile device. Let's not forget that.

As a side note, I do hope iOS will become more open under a new leadership.

Excellent perspective. Apple is not going to succeed or fail based on skeuomorphism. The iPhone and iPad have reached their success in large part because of the tremendous capability and growth of iOS, and Scott Forstall led those efforts. Yes a power struggle seems to be resolved, but Forstall's departure could turn out to be a big loss for Apple.

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