I’m mesmerised by the animations in iOS 7, and none more so than the experience of opening and exiting an app within a folder. To me, it feels like you’re doing Parkour through your apps, deftly using your surroundings to propel yourself forward and maintain as much momentum as possible.
It’s also a great example of iOS 7’s depth, and proof that the design is not as flat as most people would have us believe. Justin Williams sums this up really well in his post Layer Cake:
iOS 7 is designed to be a backlit experience that has each view stacked on top of the previous one based on its z-axis. […]
You’re seeing a lot more focus on transparency and blurs so that you can continue to see the content underneath your front-most view. Modal view controllers are no longer primarily taking over the screen entirely allowing you to maintain a sense of where you came from.
Calling iOS 7 non-innovative seems really short-sighted to me. I think it’s the start of a new, much more understandable metaphor in software design, and I can’t wait to see where it ends up.