[Thread] Google's staff engineering lead for Apple's platforms says Google stopped using Material Design for iOS apps after almost a decade, in favor of UIKit
This year my team shifted the open source Material components libraries for iOS into maintenance mode. Why? A 🧵...
Context & Ripple Effects
Material Design was built to be portable: Google shipped it across web (Material Design Lite) and even put it inside Chrome 40 for iOS back in 2015. Nearly a decade later, Google's own staff engineering lead for Apple platforms says that era is over — the company's iOS apps have moved to UIKit, and the open-source Material components libraries for iOS are now in maintenance mode.
The timing matters because Material is not being retired everywhere: Google doubled down on Android with Material 3 Expressive rolling out to Android 16 and Wear OS 6. What reads as a quiet engineering decision is actually a fork in the design system — one language deepening on Google's home platform while its cross-platform ambitions quietly end.
First-order effects
- Developers building iOS apps on Google's open-source Material components libraries inherit a maintenance-mode dependency: no active evolution, only whatever upkeep a caretaker mode implies.
- Google's own iOS apps will look and behave like native Apple apps again, ending the near-decade experiment of presenting Google's design identity inside iOS.
Second-order effects
- Third-party teams that treated Google's iOS usage as validation for Material on iOS lose their reference customer, pushing them toward Apple's own UI tooling or other cross-platform kits.
- Design investment concentrates where Google controls the stack — Android, Wear OS, and web — widening the visual divergence between Google apps on Android versus iOS rather than papering over it.
Third-order effects
- The episode illustrates the SDK governance gap: vendor-run open-source component libraries are only as durable as the vendor's strategic interest, and dependents bear the cost when priorities shift.
- If major platform owners keep pulling design systems home, the industry drifts from universal design languages toward per-platform native implementations, making 'write once, look consistent' progressively harder to sustain.
The trend: Platform-native design is reasserting itself: Google is consolidating Material around Android and Wear OS while abandoning its cross-platform push on Apple's turf.