Apple loses controversial design chief who launched overhaul of iPhone’s look

Apple’s controversial design chief, Alan Dye, is leaving the company in a major shake-up.

Mr Dye has been in charge of Apple’s user interfaces more than a decade, but will now move to Meta.

He will be replaced by Steve Lemay, who has been at Apple since 1999. “He has always set an extraordinarily high bar for excellence and embodies Apple’s culture of collaboration and creativity,” chief executive Tim Cook said in a statement to Bloomberg, which first reported the news.

Mr Dye’s time at Apple has been fraught with some controversy. That became particularly pronounced since the summer, when Apple introduced a new look for all of its software, under the branding Liquid Glass.

At its introduction, Mr Dye suggested that the new design was a refreshed look that would make it easier to engage with the content on the iPhone, Mac and other platforms. But it received mixed reviews from critics, who said that it was unnecessarily intrusive and that the redesign was sloppy.

The controversy meant that Apple was forced to offer a slider in a new update that would allow users to roll back some of the changes, by reducing the glassy look that is the signature of the design.

Mr Dye’s departure therefore led to some celebration from critics who argue that he has undermined Apple’s reputation for quality design. Those critics included John Gruber – a longtime Apple supporter who has publicly denounced a number of recent changes.

“The debate regarding Apple’s software design over the last decade isn’t between those on Dye’s side and those against. It’s only a matter of debating how bad it’s been, and how far it’s fallen from its previous remarkable heights,” Mr Gruber wrote on his blog. “It’s rather extraordinary in today’s hyper-partisan world that there’s nearly universal agreement amongst actual practitioners of user-interface design that Alan Dye is a fraud who led the company deeply astray.”

He also claimed to be aware of a number of people who have left the company as a result of that reduction in quality.

Soon after the move was announced, Mr Dye posted a Steve Jobs quotation to his Instagram page.

“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next,” he wrote.

Mr Dye’s departure comes shortly after the retirement of John Giannandrea, who had led Apple’s recent AI work. That is another of Apple’s recent focuses that has been subject to some criticism, after the company made big promises about its Apple Intelligence features – some of which have arrived either late or not at all.