Made for iOS 7 - A directory of app designs and icons updated for iOS 7

There's no mouse to use to hover on mobile or tablet devices on the web, either. I haven't seen any push for change in how hyperlinks work on the web now that mobile/tablet is a common client.

Stretching the concept a little here, but design that hinges on being able to hover the mouse to detect possible interaction reminds me of those dreadful 90's web menus where you had to hover to see the title.

In your linked example, there are as many or more hyperlinks that don't appear as buttons. The button styling in those examples indicates "primary call to action" more than anything. A page that uses button styling for every single hyperlink would be a mess. The iOS 7 styling for "primary call to action" is to make the tinted text bold, rather than giving it a background color, though that's used in some different areas too under different context.

PS, a side note that these are 3rd party examples of iOS 7 UI. Certain things are going to be misused or overused etc.

I'm with you on users generally preferring app versions. It's IMO a huge jump to say that it's because iOS 6 UI is intuitive. Users go through a lot of training, more than they may realize: friends showing their iPhones, ads on TV showing the iPhone being used, some UI concepts borrowed from the desktop paradigm people are already used to, and just that once a UI has been in the mainstream's attention for six years, people are going to have had a lot of exposure to it. After all that it's easy to say it feels intuitive. There are intuitive elements but don't overlook the amount of "training" that happens.

Responsiveness is another reason native apps tend to win out. iOS adds delays when tapping links in Mobile Safari, etc. Users also have expectations of consistent behavior for native apps, unlike the web which is its own diverse platform - iOS 7 resembles web UI in some ways, but don't forget the hundreds of pages of human interface guidelines it comes with.

I've chatted with some professional designers about exactly this and the opinions have been pretty consistent - they dislike/hate the internal homescreen.

There are a bunch of issues I've seen raised (and I agree with):

- It's hard to parse. We read left/right (or right/left as the language goes), or top/down. We don't read in zigzag easily. A tiled layout makes parsing a list of items difficult. This is, at the end of the day though, a fairly minor complaint compared to the rest.

- It gives unimportant features equal prominence to your primary features. This is, IMO, the biggest knock against using this UI. When Facebook used the internal homescreen (once upon a time) the "Notes" feature was given equal prominence to "News Feed", which seems pure silliness. When Yelp used it, the "My Account" feature was equal in prominence to "Search" and "Nearby". This happens because in almost all cases where internal homescreens are used it's because the devs can't find a better way to communicate the apps different features to the user, so the solution is to bundle it all up into a bunch of tiles and let the user deal with it.

- It encourages a high degree of modality. You launch into into this massive 9-way fork in the road, and this encourages deep UIs where it's difficult to move between the different branches without backing all the way back up to the root. The original Facebook app suffered terribly from this. The trend in recent years has been a move towards flatter, more laterally traversible UIs. See for example the Facebook Chat Heads - where messaging is embedded throughout the app without making it modal. The ubiquitous side-menu that's almost universal in iOS today is a slightly less elegant solution to the same - though in the slide-menu's defense, it's less disruptive than taking over your whole screen.

- It's user friction you didn't have to incur. If I launch into Facebook it's a pretty safe assumption I'm checking my news feed. You can also contextually very easily determine what I want to do - if I have outstanding unread messages received recently, take me to messaging. Don't make the user choose if you have a high degree of confidence about what the user is looking for. A good example of this done well is, IMO, Ness - instead of asking you for cuisines or price ranges to execute a search, it does a default search based on smart defaults (which takes into account your last search, as well as time of day and other factors), and gives you easily tools to tweak the results to what you really want. A homescreen says "I have no idea what you want, so here's everything". Imagine going to Google.com and getting dropped in a large list of everything Google does.

The Tumblr blog theme is resizing them. Just click the image and it'll show in a lightbox.

Apple needs time and usage to figure out it's "niche" for iOS 7-style UI and interaction. I look at iOS 7 as a reboot.