The journey continues, and WWDC 2014 is approaching rather quickly - we’re surely to hear a significant amount of news and updates to the current Apple platforms, and the ones yet to be revealed. Are you excited?

In the past couple of weeks we’ve covered things like user experience for Flipboard, and how to build a Newsstand application that can stand out from the rest of the crowd. It’s not as difficult as you might think, so we recommend to check those posts out and perhaps get something going.

It’s all about being able to understand the Apple’s vision of good design, and then taking those concepts and merging them into one, together with your own applications. As far as the iPhone goes, every iOS 7 update brings us a set of new features to play with, sometimes even design changes.

We want to focus upon the design changes in this post, more specifically - we want to look at some of the trending design trends for iPhone applications in the year 2014. In my research, I’ve looked at several dozens of iPhone applications, and have come up with what I believe is the ‘strong five’ of what makes a good application to sell and stand out from the crowd.

Native Environment is Way to Go

Trying to get the user to read an 10 page manual on how to use your latest radio application is never going to work out, in fact - we strictly advise against the innovation of new systems for application building. You should focus on native functions and implementations, which enable to build easy to understand action calls for your apps.

Flat, flat, flat!

You want to take advantage of the flat design trend, iOS 7 comes naturally flat, and while many people will disagree that it has any real advantage - it’s not getting popular just on mobile, it’s everywhere. And because it is everywhere, people are more likely to adapt to it, know what it is and have a more familiar experience with your application that uses a flat design.

How Minimalism Evolved Over the Years

Flat and minimal go together like bread and butter. Just take a look at this following picture, it’s a showdown of how the minimal design trend has evolved over the years, featuring the top performing companies in the world. I think the trend is clear.

I just love the fact that it’s so obvious, and with such evidence - there is no reason to say no to minimalism, it’s all about making the user experience flawless.

Great Typography is Invaluable

It’s more than just knowing how to use Comic Sans. In fact, so many people are starting to steer away from the trend of using typical fonts - and instead are starting to rely on more mature and professional font types, which may or may not cost you money.

I was reading this post from a familiar developer resource, and it really explains well - what the current state of mobile typography is, and what we can do to improve it. It’s all about personalization and making the typography work together with our style choices.

Privacy is Caring for Your Users

The last big iPhone application trend to pay high attention to is definitely privacy. We’re seeing a massive influx of privacy invasion in the last couple of months, and there are no signs of that stopping - not by a long shot. We need to make sure that we’re providing our users with the highest quality security standards that are available.

If we’re tracking our users, not only should there be a clear message about it - we should also enable the user to opt-out from being tracked; in the best case scenario - never enable tracking by default. It builds trust, which is so important to keeping our customer base.

Conclusion

I think if we can manage to implement all of these steps within our iPhone applications in 2014, we’re looking at a much brighter future, and - there is no need to innovate or reinnovate something that is already working so well for so many developers.

You’ll find it tempting to use the latest ‘kick-ass’ technology on your apps, but make sure you’re analyzing it from the both sides, and always make sure that you follow the steps we’ve discussed above.