Visual similarities make Sense

Control Center serves as another prime example of how ideas are born, reused, and reworked constantly by mobile designers. Apple's new swipe-up menu gives you quick access to often-used functions like Airplane mode, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and a brightness control. LG and Samsung were among the first major manufacturers to implement swipe-down settings toggles, adding them to their Android skins a few years ago. Several iterations of Nokia's Symbian also featured settings toggles, as did Microsoft's Windows Mobile devices, and they've been available in Android as optional homescreen add-ons for a long time. Given their prevalence across other platforms, toggles have been a much-anticipated addition to Apple's mobile interface, so it should come as no surprise that jailbreakers have made such functionality available to them for years. SBSettings is a highly customizable menu that lets you add a number of settings to a swipe-down drawer. It predates Apple's Notification Center by years.

Both Control Center and the tweaked Notification Center also introduce transparency in a way never seen before in iOS. But again, anyone familiar with modern mobile interfaces won't be shocked by the implementation. Jailbreak apps like NBSettings, which has similar functionality to SBSettings, use Gaussian blur and transparency to overlay the menu above your content, just like Control Center. But the concept goes back a long way. WebOS was full of transparency — the app launcher even floated above your wallpaper in a translucent bubble.

Blur and transparency date back to Windows Vista

For the first major use of blur and transparency in a consumer OS, you need only look at Windows Vista. The introduction of Aero Glass, which blurred background content in a strikingly similar way to iOS 7's overlays, came in 2005, although OS X had translucency in its dock since its introduction in 2000, and Apple has toyed with the concept a lot in its desktop software over the years.