A 28-Year-Old You've Never Heard Of Is The World's Most Influential App Designer

You may not know him by name, but Loren Brichter is arguably the most influential app designer in the world.

The Wall Street Journal's Jessica Lessin recently wrote a great profile on Brichter.

Brichter is the guy who developed Tweetie, a Twitter client that later became the social network's official iOS app following an acquisition of his company Atebits. He's also the guy behind the word game Letterpress, which has been downloaded millions of times, Brichter tells the WSJ.

Brichter, just 28 years old, invented the iOS trick where you pull down from the top of the screen to refresh the page of an app. He's also responsible for the panels that slide out from the side of an app, as well as the "cell swipe."

Those features are now staples in iOS apps, Lessin writes.

Pinterest, for example, uses the pull-down feature in its app, and so does Apple in its mail app. You can find variations of Brichter's sliding-panel feature in Facebook's iOS app, as well in Evernote.

"It's hard to understate the impact his ideas have had on the space," Phill Ryu, a developer for task management app Clear, tells Lessin.

Head on over to The Wall Street Journal to learn more about how Brichter has become the world's most influential app designer.