Alan Dye Leaving Apple for Meta
Alan Dye, Apple’s vice president of Human Interface Design since 2015, is departing the company. Bloomberg reports that Meta has poached Dye as part of its push “into AI-equipped consumer devices.”
Stephen Lemay, a 26-year Apple design veteran, will take over the role from Dye, who officially joins Meta [to become Chief Design Officer] on December 31.
Can he take Liquid Glass with him?
Dye has been at Apple since 2006, joining the marketing and communication team as a creative director. He transitioned to Jony Ive’s user interface team in 2012 to work on iOS 7, and he worked on subsequent iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and visionOS design updates.
I think this is the best personnel news at Apple in decades. Dye’s decade-long stint running Apple’s software design team has been, on the whole, terrible — and rather than getting better, the problems have been getting worse.
I think the fact that Dye considered Meta a good fit gives some insight into why everything he’s influenced at Apple feels so profoundly un-Apple-like.
Frankly, I think we’re all looking forward to some change ahead.
I am sure more will trickle out about this, but one thing notable to me is that Lemay has been a software designer for over 25 years at Apple. Dye, on the other hand, came from marketing and print design. I do not want to put too much weight on that — someone can be a sufficiently talented multidisciplinary designer — but I am curious to see what Lemay might do in a more senior role.
I like [Lemay]! I have a lot of respect for him.
Can we please get designers that remember that computers are bicycles for the mind and not just something to sit there and look pretty?
Previously:
- Alan and Aaron
- John Giannandrea Leaving Apple
- Shipping Liquid Glass
- Design Is How It Works
- One Size Does Not Fit All
- Jeff Williams Retiring as Apple’s COO
- Assorted Notes on Liquid Glass
- Liquid Glass
- 25 Years of the Dock and Aqua
- The Dynamic Island
Update (2025-12-09): Juli Clover:
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg today announced plans to launch a creative studio that will be led by former Apple UI designer Alan Dye.
This is a significant hire for Meta, as the company makes a push toward consumer devices like smart glasses and virtual reality headsets. Dye will focus on improving AI features in these devices and report directly to Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth.
Sebastiaan de With (John Gruber, René Fouquet):
this post by Alan Dye on instagram seems almost designed to offend. The horrible “Create Mode” typesetting. Using a Steve Jobs quote to refer to going to Meta. Yikes
I heard that Mark Zuckerberg hates Liquid Glass as much as the rest of us, and gave Alan Dye a pile of cash to stop messing up macOS.
The only way you choose to leave 2 months after shipping a major new design system across all OSs is: you think you’ve finished the job, or you think it can’t be fixed. Either way, it doesn’t reflect well on Dye.
Or maybe it’s not about his work at Apple at all—he’s probably getting a raise and a bigger role in defining the future of VR, which I guess he cared about so much that he remade all of Apple’s platforms to look like visionOS.
Alternate take: Dye was upset he was forced to pretend liquid glass was amazing when everybody, him included, knew it wasn’t ready. But after the Apple Intelligence disaster they needed something to distract the press and the liquid turd was dropped on all third party devs as a result. And so he left after the (expected) bad reception…
But there’s too many small and large, old and new unforced errors that have made macOS worse over the years that I do not buy that theory.
Re: Alan Dye - good riddance!
One thought I had that I haven’t seen elsewhere: his departure may have been preemptive.
He was in Cook’s blindside, but he clearly had detractors within the organization, and it’s possible one would have become his boss during the CEO reorganization.
A “leave before being fired” situation.
All of these things are true:
- Alan Dye should never have had the role he did at Apple
- Dye damaged Apple’s software for years (and for years to come)
- Tim Cook should have removed him long ago
- It’s a huge win for Apple’s users that he left
- Meta has such poor taste that they wanted him
Dave:
Honestly, I think this does nothing for Meta.
Every time a long time Apple exec leaves to join another company or create a new startup, people think that the Apple magic will be reproduced in that other company.
It never is.
And as aesthetically pretty as the Liquid Glass UI is, Alan Dye has never been foundational to Apple’s success.
I predict that this departure will neither hurt Apple nor benefit Meta. It’s a big splash that won’t fundamentally change either company.
The response to Alan Dye’s departure seems universally… gleeful?
Are Meta designers happy about Alan Dye joining them and voiced pleasure publicly on social media?
• • •
juan:
to commemorate alan dye moving from apple to meta, here’s one of his best quotes
Good riddance to the guy who gave us iOS 7 „flat design" that Apple, thankfully, diluted bit by bit over the years. Dye’s latest crime against humanity is the „Liquid Glass“ interface of MacOS 26
For the last year, leading up to what would eventually be known as Liquid Glass, we talked a lot about Apple’s sudden and drastic style change in iOS 7. I kept notes on little things Luka said, mostly because they make me laugh.
Alan Dye may have left for a more lucrative offer from Meta, but this is absolutely a good thing for Apple, which also benefitted from “losing” Jony Ive.
[…]
Not to put too fine a point on it, but they started making products that appealed to themselves. Because since Steve Jobs died, Apple, its executives, and its corporate employees got significantly wealthier. It wasn’t just Jony who took an interest in luxury. The whole company did. Anyone with even a little bit of power in the company started to dress more expensively. They all look like they could walk right out of a fashion advertisement.
This is all to say Apple’s restyling was not just with iOS 7 or even Liquid Glass. It was in how Apple presented themselves as people who had good taste, because that’s their way of communicating authority on the subject of design.
Alan Dye single handedly made me hate using and looking at my Mac.
Not single handed. This was reviewed, approved and implemented by many people, from top to bottom of the hierarchy. That’s what concerns me most: the lack of taste from the top and the lack of will to say no from all levels below. Starting by Craig.
There’s a lot of hate for Alan Dye right now, but keep in mind that the dude did not magically promote himself to a leadership position, at either Apple or Meta. That was the choice of the people above him.
I’ve said for a while that a key problem at Apple has been the lack of taste at the top.
But really, this all goes back further than that, to when Scott Forstall was ousted and Ive was put in charge of both hardware and software design for the first time.
[…]
With the benefit of hindsight, the merging of hardware and software design within Apple felt like a mistake that was born out of necessity, and perhaps convenience, at the time. While it’s natural to think that within a company “design” should encompass both areas, Apple was clearly build differently – until it wasn’t.
[…]
The fact that Apple has now lost two key presenters of recent marquee product unveils in the past few weeks alone, with Abidur Chowdhury (who was tasked with unveiling the iPhone Air in the all-important iPhone keynote!) also bolting for a startup, seems like an issue as well. Apple clearly – clearly – has a retention problem at the moment, something which historically has been one of the company’s main strengths. And to me, that speaks to larger issues up top.
What ended up summed up as skeumorphism eventually wore thin and looked dated (to some) because of the feeling that it was an unimpressive veneer that lacked dynamism and that forced designers to care too much about vain visuals. Reimagining the general thrust of the pre-iOS 7 world and, just to poke Google in the eye, delivering an actual "material"-focused design could have been a great innovation. Make different things look and feel different; have different textures and atmospheres. Provide the things that the typical iOS 6 app wished to deliver but with less effort and more sophistication; make every app feel easy to read visually (in both senses of the phrase) and assent to the fundamental idea that what helped people move through applications twenty and ten years ago still help them today.
Instead, the road towards blurry transparency-ism on top of denatured, austere UIs was taken. As a follow-up for the goofy reduction of title bars and streamlining of all conceivable apps to one general, see-through-sidebar-heavy layout, dipped in bleached white, it bled the platforms equally of usability and personality.
• • •
John Gruber (Mastodon, MacRumors):
What I’ve learned today is that Lemay, very much unlike Dye, is a career interface/interaction designer. Sources I’ve spoken to who’ve worked with Lemay at Apple speak highly of him, particularly his attention to detail and craftsmanship. Those things have been sorely lacking in the Dye era.
[…]
The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. (If you care about design, there’s nowhere to go but down after leaving Apple. What people overlooked is the obvious: Alan Dye doesn’t actually care about design.)
[…]
So the change in direction we may see — that many of us desperately hope to see — under Lemay’s leadership might be happenstance. More a factor of Lemay being politically safe, as someone predating Dye and outside Dye’s inner circle at Apple, than from Tim Cook or anyone else in senior leadership seeing a need for a directional change in UI design. But happenstance or not, it could be the best thing to happen to Apple’s HI design in the entire stretch since Steve Jobs’s passing and Scott Forstall’s ouster.
[…]
The most galling moment in Dye’s entire tenure was the opening of this year’s iPhone event keynote in September, which began with a title card showing the oft-cited Jobs quote “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” The whole problem with the Dye era of HI design at Apple is that it has so largely — not entirely, but largely — been driven purely by how things look. There are a lot of things in Apple’s software — like app icons — that don’t even look good any more. But it’s the “how it works” part that has gone so horribly off the rails. Alan Dye seems like exactly the sort of person Jobs was describing in the first part of that quote: “People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’”
[…]
Said my friend to me, regarding his interactions with Dye and his team at Apple, “I swear I had conversations in which I mentioned ‘key window’ and no one knew what I meant.”
The people I know at Apple speak of Lemay highly.
Steve’s the best manager I’ve ever had and is the perfect person to lead the team. Like Chan, I’m extremely excited about the new era of design at Apple.
One former colleague who worked with Lemay found him less than helpful as a designer and expressed surprise he’d managed to achieve such a senior design role, but Lemay at least seems to have a deep background in UI design. I hope that translates to Liquid Glass improvements.
I hope Stephen Lemay’s first contribution as Head of UI Design at Apple is to make the active window (and buttons) in macOS clear and distinct.
If people are right about Dye, and his successor, I’m really looking forward to seeing things steadily improve. Small improvements, one by one, over the years. Things being fixed, clever touches of usability appearing in dot updates.
It’ll be so healing—quite the contrast to the past few years.
I thought this day would never come. There may be hope again for macOS. Praise be.
It doesn’t really change my decision to dig a tunnel out of the walled garden; it’s an interesting cautionary tale. If #TimApple had wanted to be a leader, he should’ve punted Dye at the first talk of Liquid Glass.
I have to say that just because Alan Dye is leaving, doesn't necessarily mean Apple is now reverting their UI back to what we had before. Sitting out macOS Tahoe probably won't do you any favors as I Liquid Ass will probably stick around for a few years.
With Liquid Glass, while I recognize the value of a consistent design language across all of Apple’s platforms, I can’t help but think of Eudora’s “Waste cycles drawing trendy 3D junk” setting. Liquid Glass can look elegant, particularly on the iPhone, but iOS wasn’t unattractive before. More importantly, I haven’t yet felt that Liquid Glass’s vaunted transparency does anything to make me more productive. Despite Dye’s departure (which appears to have been a surprise to upper management), Apple is unlikely to reverse course on Liquid Glass.
I’m thrilled to see where Apple software design is going next.
Not gonna lie, upon seeing the subject I thought this was a Mac-Pro-style ‘mea culpa’ announcement 😂
• • •
See also: Slashdot, Mac Power Users, Dithering, Accidental Tech Podcast.
Previously:
Update (2025-12-11): Nick Heer:
While I am excited for the potential of a change in direction, I do not think this singlehandedly validates the perception of declining competence in Apple’s software design. It was Dye’s responsibility, to be sure, but it was not necessarily his fault. I do not mean that as an excuse, though I wish I did. The taste of those in charge undoubtably shapes what is produced across the company. And, despite a tumultuous week at the top of Apple’s org chart, many of those people remain in charge. To Snell’s point of not personalizing things, and in the absence of a single mention of “design” on its leadership page, the current direction of Apple’s software should be thought of as a team effort. Whether one person should be granted the authority to transform the taste of the company’s leadership into a coherent, delightful, and usable visual language is a good question. Regardless, it will be their responsibility even if it is not their fault.
Update (2026-01-08): Garrett Murray (Mastodon):
I sometimes think about what we lost along the way as Apple chased ultra-simplicity and luxury. Jony Ive spent a decade slowly removing any trace of personality from every product Apple released.
[…]
I hold the opinion iOS 7 was deeply destructive to the field of user interface design. Arguments can be made that “rich corinthian leather” was getting out of hand across Apple’s operating systems, but at least users understood the affordances—buttons looked like buttons. Suddenly that was stripped away and replaced with blank white screens on which all UI elements were simply Helvetica Neue text in either black or one additional tint color. Is that a string or a button? You wouldn’t know unless you tapped to find out.
[…]
It took 10 years for iOS to recover from iOS 7’s design overhaul. Slowly, gradients returned in a few places. Shadows, depth and, in spots here and there, playfulness. And so it was perfectly timed for Liquid Glass to land and create a whole new suite of problems we had finally solved. Ironically, I think there’s a fair amount of playfulness in Liquid Glass—at least conceptually—but the implementation is sloppy and full of UX transgressions we as an industry are far too experienced to accept.
My wife, who I would describe as the stereotypical iPhone user, is asking me about upcoming Android phones. This is how bad iOS 26 is. She is considering switching platforms. She has never owned an Android phone in her life. She uses Apple services almost exclusively (except where I could convince her to not do it, like Email). iOS 26 is so buggy, so ugly and so hard to use that she is willing to throw that away.
