Jarrett Fuller

The software design language Apple used for the first few years of the iPhone is what we now commonly refer to as skeuomorphic, which was essentially mimicking real world, physical objects. There were visual metaphors like a leather texture in Calendar, a handwriting font in Notes, a wooden bookshelf in Books that contrasted with the minimalist design of the hardware. It looked like this:

In 2013, Apple released iOS7 and replaced nearly all the skeuomorphs with what was then referred to as a “flat design” that looked like this:

This led, as you would expect, to much debate about the merits of one or the other, skeuomorphic or flat. Those feel like simpler times. In the years since, however, Apple has gradually added texture and depth back into the iPhone interface without ever fully returning to a skeuomorphic approach. (Liquid Glass, its latest design language, in other words, is neither flat nor skeuomorphic but is also filled with texture, depth, tone in a way iOS7 was not.)

The argument was that in those early years, visual software design should mimic their physical counterparts so users would understand how to interact with them on a glass screen. After we got comfortable with it, the metaphors were no longer necessary; the move from skeuomorphic to flat.

I’ve been thinking about this now-long-ago debate because I just got one of the new iPhone 18 Pros (I tend to keep my phones for as long as I can before upgrading) and every time I get a new phone, I like to poke around apps I know well just to see what new things it can do.

I opened up the Camera app — an app I’ve used probably every day since my first iPhone — and heard this sound:

It’s 2026 and when I click the button on my glass phone, it makes a shutter sound! There are still skeuomorphs in iOS after all! The skeuomorphic designs of the early camera simulated a shutter closing and opening when you a took a photo but that’s long been replaced with just a subtle blink of the screen. And yet! The shutter sounds remains.

This is curious because it does not aid in usability. You get the visual cue on the screen a photo has been taken. What’s more, I wonder how many iPhone users today have taken photographs with a camera that has physical shutter? Do most iPhone users even know what a shutter is? (The irony is not lost on me that this new phone actually does have a physical shutter. That shutter, though, is silent. Apple is essentually simulating the shutter sound while a real shutter is actually firing.)

I always have my phone on silent so I don’t hear the sound design throughout iOS but I started poking around the sound settings to see if any other skeumorphs remain. The only other app that simulates a physical sound is the Phone app itself, where when one presses the number keys, it sounds like pressing numbers on a landline phone, noticbly different than the simple taps heard on the general keyboard interface. Interestingly, too, the keyboard taps do not sound like mechanical keys or even Apple’s own hardware keyboards: they are clearly digital. There are, of course, classic rings when you get a phone call, but they are not set to the default.

I started thinking about Brian Eno’s Windows95 startup sound — perhaps the first Eno “song” I ever heard, certainly a soundtrack to my childhood. Or how last year, Apple asked Phineas to compose a new sound design for Apple TV. I’m no sound designer so I have no answer but I’m curious what other sounds could simulate the taking of a photo? What new tones would sound appropriate? Could the shutter sound be, ironically, the perfect skeuomorph?