Meta Poached Apple’s Top Design Guys to Fix Its Software UI

Meta has made a large determination to prosecute 2 salient designers distant from rival tech elephantine Apple, apt putting them to enactment connected designing Meta’s adjacent procreation of AI hardware and the bundle that runs connected it.

Alan Dye, formerly Apple’s vice president of Human Interface Design, volition articulation Meta to caput up a caller plan workplace wrong Meta’s Reality Labs. Billy Sorrentino, a elder manager connected Apple’s plan squad (and erstwhile WIRED originative director) volition besides articulation Meta’s Reality Labs.

In a station connected the Meta level Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the 2 would pb the caller workplace and “bring unneurotic design, fashion, and exertion to specify the adjacent procreation of our products and experiences.” In his ain Instagram post, Sorrentino confirmed the news. (In effect to a petition for remark from WIRED, a Meta rep pointed toward the Threads posts by Zuckerberg and Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth.)

Dye has agelong been a salient fig successful Apple’s plan team, starring large pushes similar watchOS, the Apple Vision Pro, and the somewhat arguable Liquid Glass redesign of iOS 26, which designers called beauteous but “hard to read.” His power to Meta telegraphs a hunger from the Zuckerberg-run institution to recreate Apple’s dominance successful enactment design, adjacent if it has besides caused immoderate radical to gag astir what the Liquid Glass feline volition bash to Meta’s plan interface.

Anshel Sag, a tech expert astatine Moor Insights & Strategy, says that supra thing else, the determination telegraphs a determination by Meta to hole its often stodgy and unappealing idiosyncratic interface crossed its platforms.

“Meta has ever been a bundle nightmare,” Sag says. “There’s a batch of inconsistency crossed each of Meta’s bundle platforms. Facebook, Insta, WhatsApp, Quest—they person not had the highest standards of quality. That’s particularly existent of the idiosyncratic interface. If they privation users to enactment connected their platform, they’re going to person to hole the UI.”

The determination comes arsenic Meta continues to spell perfectly each successful connected its AI efforts. Earlier this year, Meta poured seemingly endless wealth into its effort to its alleged Superintelligence lab, which aimed to physique a squad of high-salary AI superstars to beforehand the company’s instrumentality quality goals. (Hirees started leaving hardly a period later.) At the aforesaid time, Meta is besides considering large fund cuts to its Reality Labs efforts.

Above all, the institution has leaned hard into its AI-powered astute gasses, each but cornering the marketplace with its Ray-Ban Meta lenses. This is wherever Zuckerberg’s caller attraction to plan and manner travel in, considering that the Meta astute glasses person succeeded successful nary tiny portion due to the fact that of the crisp designs of the frames made by its spouse EssilorLuxottica. People aren’t going to deterioration astute glasses, nary substance however powerful, if they look dumb. (Case successful point, the caller Meta Ray Ban Display glasses, which are precise almighty but look existent chonky.) Focusing connected much elegant designs has intelligibly go a front-and-center precedence for Meta. But much importantly, it has to marque the devices enactment good together.