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RJ Rian Johnson On The Vergecast

“Developing the app, I realized how smart Apple's design is, even in the camera app. There were a lot of things where we started with 'let's do it more efficiently' and found ourselves gravitating back towards what Apple decided to do. Terrific design, not in terms of looking cool, but in terms of usability, which is the true definition of good design.”

The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

“Developing the app, I realized how smart Apple's design is, even in the camera app. There were a lot of things where we started with 'let's do it more efficiently' and found ourselves gravitating back towards what Apple decided to do. Terrific design, not in terms of looking cool, but in terms of usability, which is the true definition of good design.” — Rian Johnson, The Vergecast

Context

Johnson was describing building his own camera app with collaborators. Rebuilding one from scratch showed him how deliberate Apple's choices in its camera app are.

Transcript

The Vergecast Around 28:10 into the episode
Speaker 1

…professional cinematographers. But anyway, when I brought them this, Eric was the one who did most of the coding with this. I think both of them can code and are very proficient. I think it was a mixture. I think they did use Claude for some stuff. But I think it was a mixture to create the app. I

David Imel

think there's a lot of excitement around the prototyping of things and being able to just come up with ideas and then maybe finish them off later using your skill sets and things like that. Do you think that's

Speaker 1

leading to better stuff or more interesting stuff?

David Imel

It's hard to say. I think sometimes it's like, well, being able to have an idea and then have a prototype in general is useful. There's also clearly a lot of just bad code being shipped. Google is shipping very bad vibe-coded stuff that isn't really working. Interesting. Apple's doing that a little…

Speaker 1

was interesting. I mean, this is a different, different topic. One of the things that was really interesting for me as someone who's used the iPhone since the first version of it in going back and forth with Steve and Eric and developing the app and specifically developing the camera portion of it…

David Imel

decided to do. What Apple said,

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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