I'd also like to meet all these mythical users that have devices from every platform and want all their apps to look the same across all platforms. 99% of people I know IRL are in one ecosystem, with the exception of some that have an iPhone/iPad + Windows PC
In a previous company when we were looking at precisely this problem, building out multiple platform support, we did UX studies where this question in particular came up. The vast majority of people said they wanted apps to act consistently across devices. Most people on the planet use Windows with Android, statistically speaking, which are not similar devices at all, at least on Apple platforms you can use Swift for desktop and phone but not so for Windows and Android, so you have to make a choice at that point.
> The vast majority of people said they wanted apps to act consistently across devices
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.
If you have zero evidence against the mountains of evidence I do have, why should I be convinced of your argument. It seems like it is you who are talking subjectively about what you want and then applying that to everyone else.
I find it very hard to believe that majority of people prefer app consistency over platform consistency.
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?
Spotify looks much similar between devices than it does to any specific platform. Does it use Material on Android and Fluent on Windows? No, it uses the same sort of styling on both. Don't mistake UI changes for screen size responsiveness, for actual platform specific nativity.
> The vast majority of people said they wanted apps to act consistently across devices
... 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!)
You can achieve them with native controls but only at the bottom-most layer, if you actually want consistency. Spotify for example does not use Material on Android, Human Design Guidelines on Apple, and Fluent on Windows (well, they use Electron, bypassing native desktop entirely), they use their own custom controls that may at the very bottom layer be based on native text inputs, but they rebuilt all the actual UI stuff from scratch to achieve a unified look and act.
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 the end users that care about the uniformity but the fact the corporate design team wants there to be uniformity across all their platforms they support. This is part of branding and user experience. I'm not arguing for or against, just stating that is where the push for this comes from. It would make support, for example, easier, if all versions of your app user experience were similar.
This is very true, and it's a PITA when the corporate design team doesn't know anything about mobile design and thinks mobile apps are just "Honey, I shrunk the web app" with some Figma plugins to help. It can be an uphill battle to get them to compromise.
It's because while it's true on the company side, this comment is making it seem as if the company is doing this against their users' will, while in reality, most users genuinely want a unified experience across platforms for their apps, as seen by some of the comments here.
It doesn't seem to mention it being done against anyone's will. It's definitely true that a company can save money by only needing to maintain one set of help instruction screenshots, for example.
Ever since the release of the M1, the number of Android users who now use Macbooks as their laptop has sharply increased. Even moreso for work purposes.
Hello! I use three platforms on a daily basis. I vastly prefer my apps to be reasonably consistent with themselves rather than trying too hard to adhere to the platform.
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.
> I'd also like to meet all these mythical users that have devices from every platform and want all their apps to look the same across all platforms.
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.
