TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

I haven’t posted anything this week both because I was in San Francisco until Wednesday evening and because iOS 7 has taken me a while to wrap my head around, but Marco Arment wrote what I think is one of the more interesting pieces about the update:

One of my favorite patterns in our industry is when the old and established are wiped out by disruption, irrelevance, or changing fashions. Like a forest fire, clearing out the old is very destructive and shouldn’t be taken lightly. But what’s left behind is a clean slate and immense opportunity.

I don’t think we’ve ever had such an opportunity en masse on iOS. After what we saw of iOS 7 yesterday, I believe this fall, we’ll get our chance.

He’s absolutely right. iOS 7 is so different—both aesthetically and functionally—that nearly all applications will need substantial updates. Applications that go un-changed will feel old and wrong in an even more dramatic way than applications that weren’t updated for retina displays. As a result, there’s going to be an App Store clearing.

But more importantly, this is an opportunity for new entrants into almost every category because it is so different. Application makers have a chance to re-think not only how they look, but what they do, and how they do it. The design concepts Apple introduced are in their infancy, and I think we all are going to help define them with the applications we build.

While talking with people at WWDC, I found myself starting to think that iOS 7 is early days in much the same way the iPhone was when the App Store was released. We have the chance to define the interfaces for the next five years. That’s incredibly exciting.