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From Fake Leather to the Great Flattening: The Evolution of iOS

With the debut of iOS 7 this week, Apple has made the most radical change to its mobile operating system since it first launched on the iPhone way back in 2007. Need proof? Let's take a walk down memory lane and look at how iOS has evolved.
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With the debut of iOS 7 this week, Apple has made the most radical change to its mobile operating system since it first launched on the iPhone way back in 2007. Need proof? Let's take a walk down memory lane and look at how iOS has evolved. Apple introduced a boatload of design and user experience elements with the first version of iOS. The bulk of those stuck around largely unchanged through iOS 6. Over the years, new apps, settings, and features were added -- all things that made the OS more useful and, for the most part, improved the user experience. And of course, these additions all spoke the same design language. But now, for the first time since its birth, the look and feel of iOS is fundamentally different. We look at how it got there, and we trace some of its important milestones along the way. Photo: Alex Washburn / Wired