phones - is good UI dead?

I have been thinking about phones, specifically about they all look almost the same really.

iOS 18 by Apple (2024)

For instance, look at Apple's latest release, dated 2024:

Icons, wallpaper, lockscreen. Quite simple, quite clean, no problem there.

OneUI 7 by Samsung (2025)

And now, here is Samsung with their OneUI 7 release, dated 2025:

Very similar looking, outside a few (and small) design choices.

PixelOS by Google (2024)

And now let's have a look at Google's latest software, PixelOS, dated 2024:

Starting to see a pattern? That's because there is.

What happened?

Up to maybe even 5-6 years ago choosing what device to go with as a consumer was a far more important choice than it is today due to there being a bigger gap, more key differences between each company's devices and OS, the UX was different on each and there was something to fit everyone's different needs.

Fast forward to today, individualism when it comes to UI/UX in phones has started to become a fainter line by the year, the decision between what device to go to has never mattered less as all companies run on essentially the same business model and usually run off the same if not very similar creative choices.

Before

So what changed since the 2010s? Why did everyone decide to go with a similar design instead of separating themselves from the competition?

Simple, make the choice simpler, appeal to the more general public instead of your somewhat loyal user base and recruit more by making everything so similar the consumer wont feel as intimidated about switching over. More consumers, more money.

Android 5 (2015)

I can appreciate that there's not much wiggle room when it comes to the creative approaches a phone OS takes but, my personal opinion, you knew what you were looking what, there was plenty of differences to spot between a device running Android and an iPhone running iOS back then. Similar base, allowing users to switch in between with (moderate confusion) but the design was different enough that it had people in different camps.

iOS 9 (2015)

Following their major redesign since iOS 7 (2013), Apple has been charging a steady course with their UI/UX, for the years to come anyway. The differences between iOS and Android were there, they looked similar in the sense that there was a home screen and icons but the rest in my opinion was different, the feature were different and there was an actual competitor going on unlike today.

Conclusion

The competition between OSes is basically gone, individualism is pretty much gone and it seems like recently everyone has decided to embrace the same design language. Me myself, I see this as both a positive and a negative, a positive in the sense that with everything being the same it is much easier to alternate between devices from different companies (until it comes to having an ecosystem and such) but also a negative in the sense everything is boring now, you know what to expect and you can see it coming from miles away, turning phones from what used to be a quite exciting technological innovation to a mundane expense.