Sure, but not every cross-platform app developer wants their app to look "native to iOS". Especially if you want your app to look the same on all platforms and/or have some creative design.
I would prefer the apps I use to work and behave in a consistent way, using the same platform idioms I am used to. The software available and how it works was a large part of the reason I chose the platform I did.
Of course, I recognise that, a. most people just don’t care about platform idioms, and b. the choice is often a non-native app or no app at all.
There are variances between Apple’s apps but they’re all using some combination of UIKit and SwiftUI regardless which limits how “wrong” they can be.
Few Flutter apps are going to use cupertino because the whole goal of using Flutter is to create cross platform codebases to save development effort. To use an alternative widget set per platform is a huge amount of additional work, and having a cupertino app running on Android is even more of a sore thumb than a material app on iOS.
That is a bizarre fact.
There are DOZENS of us!!!
I try my absolute best to find apps that use the native Apple language, both design and code. I can't stand these framework apps. I will Pepsi challenge this with anyone who asks, I can smell a framework app.
The platforms ship with things like keyboard shortcuts for navigation and text entry, minimal accessibility features like screen reading of text and navigation, common idioms like drag and drop and the clipboard - none of which are typically handled by cross-platform widget frameworks by default.
Only gigantic projects like Chrome and VS Code will take on the effort of (partially) reimplementing these in their codebases to match platform behavior.
This is the big one. HN commenters are not representative of the average user. You'd have to specifically point out the differences for them to even notice, and even then they simply don't care.
Granted this is my personal experience, I can't say this is the case for every single user out there.
If you can't copy or paste things, or if the navigation is backwards, or if the calendar looks weird etc etc - it all causes some minor frustrations, when things don't behave as user wants them to behave.
They don't know what "native" means, obviously - they don't have that knowledge. They just know crappy apps from well-behaving apps, because they have a frame of reference (vendor-supplied native apps).
Perhaps they're not complaining because they've just accepted that it probably doesn't work and so don't even try anymore.
My SO has stopped trying to copy/pasting stuff, I now always just get screenshots, both from mobile and her PC.
At work, almost none of the customers I interact with copy/paste stuff, they send screenshots as well. Like, "can you send me the order number?" will result in a screenshot of the order number control, or often just the whole order window.
My wife is on two. Most of my friends are on either two or three. In fact, I'm pretty sure my parents and a few coworkers are the only people I know who are exclusively on one platform.
Many (most?) people don't have a clue as to what the particulars of any given platform even are. They know how to get around in each app they use, and maybe the web browser, and that's it. Lots of gestures go completely unused.
Maybe 40% of the developers I know use MacOS + Android.
You shouldn’t trust what users say they want. It many times doesn’t correlate with what they want. Certainly, I would try and figure out what they mean with “act consistently”. My suspicion (for which I have zero evidence) is that they’re more talking about high-level similarity than about nitty-gritty details such as how many milliseconds to hold your finger down to select and edit text, how scrolling works, etc.
Also, I suspect they want devices to act constantly across apps, too: copy-paste should work, text editing should behave identically, sharing controls should be the same, etc.
In the current world (and, I think, in any world where there is competition in any form between platforms), they cannot get both, so then, it boils down to what is more important.
For me, that’s platform consistency. For example, I find it easier to get used to text editing being different on a phone and on a laptop than to get used to a zillion minor inconveniences/annoyances in typing and editing behavior between apps.
I also find it less of a problem if text and emoji look slightly different on a different device than when they look slightly different between apps.
How should I interpret the following four paragraphs where you say what you want?
One example, I'm pretty sure there are thousands more: Why does every UI detail, except the logo, of Spotify looks and feels different in Android, Android Auto and PC/laptop? Because Spotify did not study what the market wants?
... which you can absolutely do while using native UI controls. "Act consistently" (UI controls are in similar places and present themselves with similar UX) is not the same as "look consistently" (UI controls are drawn using whatever system theme or drawing style is in use).
Certainly there is some overlap between look & act: a platform-native "dropdown menu" looks and acts a little differently on Windows vs Android vs iOS. But I think these differences are not in the majority, and when users say they want apps to "act consistently" across platforms, you an absolutely achieve that with native UI controls, and it's not even that difficult.
This is a big problem I've run into when doing user studies myself: you need to be very precise with your language when asking users questions, and even then you often need to dig in and ask for details about what they mean by their answer. And of course having visual examples and functional mockups for users to play with helps a ton.
Another problem is the leading nature of questions you might ask during a user study: if you simply say "do you think it's better if the app acts consistently across platforms", of course users are going to say "yes". Saying "no" to that question feels kinda stupid, TBH. But if you were to give a user an iPhone and Android phone, with the same app, using native controls on both platforms, and ask them if you believe that the apps "act consistently" with each other, users are probably going to say "yes", as long as the design and UX of the apps in general are consistent with each other.
(And even that's a contrived test: very few people use both an iPhone and Android phone regularly!)
This is all well and good but the people I see on HN are ones that say that the app should actually look native on each platform, ie Material on Android etc. This opinion is what I'm pushing back on, not the fact that ctrl + C works on Windows and CMD + C works on Mac.
Of course, this is the reason why cross platform frameworks are so popular, if you're already gonna have to rewrite the UI for every platform, why not just do it once and save yourself the effort? After all, users won't care, as they've shown, because they care much more about new features coming out. There are always tradeoffs because time is finite.
> This is a big problem I've run into when doing user studies myself
Sigh, do you really think that all of these weren't considered when we did user studies? This is like 101 material, frankly almost insulting to imply that we didn't, therefore it can justify your priors, even though I agree with your points to some extent as said before.
It's not even a single person that has them, but I think we have all had the experience of family or friends that need assistance with something but they have a different type of phone whose organization and workflow is completely different because it's native. You literally can't help in this scenario without having physical access to the device.
Windows, and Mac OS X in particular, have quite good support for accessibility if you use their built-in GUI systems, and unified UIs are often (not always, vscode and chrome are quite good, for example), very bad, sometimes just a black square as far as accessibility goes.
https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility-and-internationali...
Unfortunately, most cross-platform frameworks have awful accessibility support, I've looked at various in the past and just found failure after failure. I am now going to look harder at flutter.
It is exceedingly rare for the multiple devices to span the UI toolkits of more than one or two company-platform. For people in the Apple ecosystem, they don't want to see something that looks like it belongs on Android.
Regardless, "unified UI" doesn't mean it can't use native controls. More important from a UX perspective is that controls are in the same places and behave similarly, and that the app is organized in a similar manner, plus or minus what might naturally change because of differences in screen size and input method. And that's another useful point to make too: mobile, tablet, and desktop experiences are often quite different, and that's normal and expected at this point.
Another consideration: it's a lot more difficult to make an accessible app when you draw your own custom UI controls with your own custom behavior. If you use the native UI controls, you get a lot of the accessibility features for free, and have to do much less work to make sure everything works for people who are vision or mobility impaired. From what I understand after reading about blind people's experiences on various platforms, most companies that do custom UI don't bother, and the accessibility of their apps is atrocious.
> For people in the Apple ecosystem, they don't want to see something that looks like it belongs on Android.
I have not seen evidence among normal people that this is true, given that the most popular apps all have custom UIs that don't necessarily follow Apple's HIG, TikTok for example. Regardless, the point is that if you're making an app for every platform like iOS, Android, Windows etc, you must make a choice lest you exclude all non-Apple users for example. ByteDance does therefore indeed use Flutter, based on this (at least in some capacity).
> mobile, tablet, and desktop experiences are often quite different
Don't conflate unified UI to mean non responsiveness. Look at Spotify, their UI is essentially the same in design except it is responsive among mobile, tablet and desktop, all while not looking native at all on any of them.
Regarding accessibility, many frameworks can be robust in that simply because they hook into the native implementation anyway, so I'm not sure where this trope of not having accessibility comes from. Here is Flutter's for example, with a dev in this thread also having talked about how they have one of the most robust implementations of accessibility that they have found among any framework: https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility-and-internationali...
I used to share your opinion but since the web I think it is great that designers can have original designs and I started to worry about more important things.
E.g, I have to use a Java app on the Mac that uses Ctrl+V rather than Cmd+V for paste as well as other Windows/Linux keyboard conventions. This is extremely jarring.
Web apps never do that. Browsers are pretty good at using native conventions where it matters by default. Of course web devs sometimes go out of their way to vandalise the browser's perfectly good defaults - e.g. by overriding scrolling behaviour.
Surprisingly, some of Apple's own native apps (such as Numbers) break platform conventions in ways that makes the app extremely inconvenient to use.
In an alternate universe, where web apps were embraced by the platform from the start rather than something people had to shoehorn into a document sharing mechanism, and we had rich components built-in, then yes I would probably be annoyed if people insisted on rolling their own versions. After all, I am annoyed when people use a span with a click handler instead of a proper anchor tag, because it usually breaks middle clicking or opening a link in a new tab—a platform convention I have internalised and expect to work.
Note this only applies to web apps, not sites. Much like how I do not have any problem that magazines don’t share a common layout.
E.g., if you have Instagram on your iPhone, an Android user won’t be able to tell you “just click on this, this, then this to change your XYZ setting” because it will be in a different place than the Android app if developers follow native conventions 100% of the time.
The fact that Spotify or Instagram or any of those other platform-agnostic apps look and function the same on every platform is a huge benefit to practical usability.
I think the only time when nativeness matters is when you have an app that’s doing stuff that’s closer to being “low level” to operating system features. For example, an app that performs file system management, I don’t want that to have the exact same UI on Mac, Windows, and Linux, because those platforms have different conventions for where things go and how files are represented.
It’s kind of like the difference between VS Code and MS Teams. Same company, same underlying technology (Electron), but Code is good while Teams is awful because MS invests so much more in Code. Even so, Teams-type apps are what tends to come to mind when people think of Electron apps because those are so much more common.
I think that what is commonly seen by devs as complaining and being overly concerned with details that don't matter is instead a some of the time advocacy for doing things the right way for the sake of it. It is totally possible to build things that meet the bare minimum requirements for user retention and for people to not complain, but that doesn't mean that it is optimal. You can build Soviet style housing blocks that people live in that are completely functional and that no one will have any problem with, but the quality of life is degraded as opposed to what could have been built.
It can be tough seeing through the grumpy nerd 'I want it my way because my way is best' and finding what is actually 'this is a good thing that we should be doing, and if we did there would be a marked improvement for everyone', but I would not forsake one due to the other.
Every time I've ever mentioned it to anyone they really didn't seem to understand or care
In most cases, I personally rarely want an app, and I'll use a website unless they happen to have created a great native experience. And since most apps don't, I don't use them, and I don't have a lot of apps as a result.
As a user, I hate it when some app developer thinks they're cute and wants to skin an app differently or draw their own ad-hoc widgets.