I'm sorry if it's a dumb question, but didn't Microsoft already do this with Vista and Win 7? And I'm pretty sure transparency has been a thing on Android for a good while now:-?
I honestly don't even know why I'm paying attention to Apple at this point, I think it's like digging my nail into a freshly scarred-over cut, just to tease that sting out a bit. It's the only way in which they have ever contributed to my feeling alive.
I only "follow" because whatever Apple does gets broadcast by every media outlet in existence. Also Google started blindly following Apple design since they killed my beloved blob emojis.
The blob emojis were one of their best features, that's so true! I kid you not, every single time I've used Slack for work, for every single company which used it, someone had already uploaded the blobs! I really didn't understand that move, the current Smile emoji looks psychotic.
Google themselves don't really follow material all that closely over their entire product line.
Android 6 was basically the peak of the UI, IMO, the icons were very consistent and nice early material.
In later versions they shrank the icons and stuffed them into circles and started using a horrible color scheme, then they killed blobmoji and started outright copying Apple's hideous emojis with that awful gradient and pseudo-skeumorphic visuals.
I mean... look, I'm genuinely not trying to be a sour asshole, but why did we need this? How is this furthering the development of smartphone tech? It's, like... sure, pretty graphics are nice, but do we really need ray-tracing on our phones? (I know it's not ray-tracing, but you get my point)