Why iPhone apps are so much more beautiful
  

 
Every Ux Designer working today knows the iPhone is a game changer in raising the bar for the entire software industry.  It's often said that the iPhone ruined the gig for Developers because users now expect iPhone quality experiences in everything they consume. 

How many new product teams kickoff their desktop or web projects by saying they want "iPhone quality" in the Ux?  A lot do.  Most fail to deliver.

Why do iPhone app teams succeed at iPhone quality, but desktop developers don't?

Watch this vid.

From the video it is easy to appreciate the sheer number of revisions a single iPhone screen undergoes to become beautiful.  This is no simple process of drawing a few Buxton-style sketches then kicking the Design over to Creative for a chrome job.  It's a painstaking process of refinement where the Designer tries something, tosses it, goes back to the way it was, changes it, starts over, etc.  The most challenging and cool elements are the smallest details.  It's not 5 or 6 revisions to the Ux...it's 50 or 60.  Per screen!

Yet - it can be done.  Mostly because iPhone apps generally have one main screen (the goal screen) and only a few supporting screens (tool screens).  The majority of iPhone apps ship with under a half dozen screens.

Now consider the typical enterprise application, with its 50 - 500 screens, and imagine using that process from the video.  Yeah.  That ain't happening.

A Designer can afford to nerdfest one or two screens, but that level of quality quickly becomes unreachable with high screen counts.

On the Microsoft stack we can use WPF to make beautiful applications almost effortlessly, where beauty and simplicity have very little technical cost.  However, tons of iteration on the experience itself is still necessary - and when teams aren't willing or able to commit the necessary 50 to 60 iterations...the quality just won't be there.