Over the years, the iPhone has evolved radically -- and succeeded throughout its development. This is one of the most impressive feats of Apple, leading it to top the holiday sales according to a report from 9to5 Mac.

But how much has it really evolved? Google's vice president of design Matias Duarte pointed out in a recent interview with Wired: not much.

Almost a decade after the first iPhone was launched, the familiar grid of applications and the Apple's basic design has stayed mostly the same. Duarte described the rise of the iPhone as "fairly positive" and then explained, "But it also crystallised a lot of other things that were kind of stayed even by that point, like the rows of icons, which don't scale very well. This idea of a tiny grid that you manually curate starts to feel very heavy and burdensome."

It's easy for things to settle on standards that are sub-optimal," he continued. "It's very for things to catalyse into local maxima that are hard to break out of."

Duarte added, "Frankly it's not a world where the best package wins. It would've been very easy, if Apple had been a year later to market, that instead the market's expectations of what a smartphone should be crystallised around something that's more like what the BlackBerry was."

The Google executive and the rest of the team, working on the design of the upcoming Android Wear, was forced to innovate with the watch as the small screen proved to be a different experience that might not perform well with the traditional grid interface.

"So that created this opportunity where we could try something new and different," he explained. "I don't know that Android Wear has the right solution or even is on a vector to the right solution, nobody knows. We're just trying things to see which are successful. That's what design is. You form a thesis, you try to do it without any ego or hubris."

Still, despite the nature of the work, Duarte remains hopeful that the devices will evolve into even greater and more efficient gadgets. He pointed out, "When we talk about phones and websites and apps, this is an incredibly young medium still. It's changing very quickly and it's still almost at this raw industrial state."

He concluded, "That is one of the things that I care passionately about. I'm going to do my hardest to make sure that in 10 years time you're not going to sitting with a single laptop and walking around with a phone. But instead working with a much richer, continuous mesh of devices and interfaces."