A great piece by Matt Drance.

This is a thought I wish I had in my article on iOS 7:

The emphasis on text is also striking. More than just content, text has replaced iconography in many cases. Look at Camera: the modes — VIDEO, PHOTO, SQUARE, PANO — are represented by text for the first time ever on iOS. This to me is proof that “clarity” has taken top priority. iOS is available in a number of countries and languages, which means every piece of text has to be localized (translated) many times over. This isn’t only time consuming, it’s disruptive to UI design: a short word in English is not necessarily short in German, and suddenly things don’t fit on screen anymore. I attended many meetings at Apple where people cringed at changing a word shortly before release, because it meant a whole new round of localize-then-build-then-test.

Apple still hasn’t seeded a developer beta of iOS 7 for iPad. Looking at one of the official screenshots posted online (the Music app, mirrored here), I wonder if more Apple apps for iPad will also prefer text over icons in tab bars.