[solarkraft]

Do users care? It doesn't feel exactly native on Android, but is still fast and looks great (it might indeed be better than native).

Afaik the main alternatives, RN and Web (for fully reusable UI) are both heavy and don't feel that native either, yet are popular with developers.

[hn_throwaway_99]

IMO, UI frameworks that try to mimic native components virtually always fail, because they end up being an almost-but-something-I-cant-put-my-finger-on-feels-wrong situation, e.g. performance isn't quite there or the physics is different.

Much better IMO to go for a "minimalistic", neutral interface where people won't always be comparing your app to better native controls.

[Apocryphon]

That's why Google is trying to push Material as a default alternative to Cupertino widgets, perhaps.

[saagarjha]

As a user, I care quite a bit. As a developer, though, I get paid to tell people that their software doesn’t follow platform UI conventions and I run their code through mental checklists (“does the title animate properly during a controller pop, does this custom view break accessibility”) so I think it’s pretty obvious that I have a very specific slant on this issue. Keeping that in mind, I think that many users do care but they don’t necessarily make it the only thing they care about, nor are they particularly good about vocalizing their concerns. To them an app is just “weird”, or “unusable”, depending on what the framework actually breaks.

[Klonoar]

Slant is putting it mild - you gotta start putting a disclosure in these kinds of comments or something. You were a WWDC scholarship recipient, interned at Apple, and seem to base your career on Apple tech.

You are not a typical user, you will notice things most ordinary people would never think to notice. The vast majority of apps on a phone aren't even kept open by a user long enough for it to matter.

I say this as someone who prefers native controls, has written/launched apps in ObjC/Swift/etc. There's increasingly little reason to bother with the stack.

[saagarjha]

> You were a WWDC scholarship recipient, interned at Apple, and seem to base your career on Apple tech.

I dabble in Android and Linux as well ;)

> You are not a typical user, you will notice things most ordinary people would never think to notice. The vast majority of apps on a phone aren't even kept open by a user long enough for it to matter.

Agree on both counts, but I like to think that users aren't completely clueless. There are certain things that they do feel acutely: animation physics that differ from the system's (particularly for things like scrolling), lag, choppiness, lack of proper accessibility support…

> There's increasingly little reason to bother with the stack.

I disagree with this (this isn't just an iOS thing, by the way: I would say the same for every other platform I've interacted with). It is almost certain to be the case that the team that wrote the platform libraries is smarter, better, and cared more than you did about the UI (there are some very notable exceptions, but I think it's very obvious when this is the case). Going with the native stack means lock-in and sometimes more work, but in exchange you get a significant amount of functionality "for free" (sometimes without even realizing that this functionality existed) and automatically share a common design language with the rest of the system, which is a usability plus for users almost all of the time.

[dliff]

I agree. Typical users aren't going to complain "hey this app doesn't feel native" or even know what that means!

However, they will likely find it harder to use without an explanation why. If most of the apps a user uses follow the guidelines of Android/iOS, and they are primarily a user of one platform, and your app doesn't follow either, it seems obvious that they won't be able to use their built-up knowledge of how apps work in general to navigate your app.

Most people I know, including myself, have found it initially a little more difficult to navigate around apps from the platform other than the one we are used to using daily.

Apps that insist on creating the same UI on both platforms can be a mixed bag, IMO. Sometimes executed well, sometimes poorly. Because of this, I usually prefer apps that separately comply with each platform.

I am however interested in playing around with Flutter soon!

[skybrian]

I kinda wonder about this stuff. Seems like it depends on your user base and I'd like to see the user study.

Helping older relatives who find touchscreens to be disconcerting (due to mistaken touches that they don't instinctively recover from by hitting the back button), I think native look and feel doesn't go nearly far enough to make things easy to use, for some audiences anyway.

[com2kid]

> If most of the apps a user uses follow the guidelines of Android/iOS, and they are primarily a user of one platform, and your app doesn't follow either, it seems obvious that they won't be able to use their built-up knowledge of how apps work in general to navigate your app.

I just checked my 8 most commonly used apps, exclusing Chrome / Gmail, FWIW I am using Android.

1. Spotify - Doesn't follow any sort of UI standards. Also randomly decides to go into drive mode.

2. Clock - Built in, follows guidelines. About 50% of the time I hit the "trash" icon when I want to reset a countdown timer.

3. Development tool, not counting this

4. Libby, awesome app to checkout books local libraries. They have some seriously cool (but not always discoverable!) UI elements that custom solve problems that have. Their audio scrubber and speed changer for audio books are really cool.

5. Tabata timer - Doesn't follow any guidelines, really really needs a "stop" button instead of relying on back button to stop a workout.

6. Audible - Custom purpose driven UI, similar to Libby but different enough it can be a bit troublesome going back and forth.

7 and 8. Games, always have a custom UI, no problem using them.

tl;dr normal doesn't exist.

[abacadaba]

> 1. Spotify - Doesn't follow any sort of UI standards. Also randomly decides to go into drive mode.

And lesson #1 in why to always follow some/any kind of UI standard.. Luckily their algorithms/service are decent.

[monocularvision]

Users dependent on accessibility will also know the difference.

[WA]

I agree. I have an app that is made with Ionic and has about 16,000 paying users. The target group aren't techies/designers. Nobody ever wrote me something like "your app feels weird". Users care more about what problem they can solve with the app.

One of my competitors has a native app, but they require an internet connection, and saving a data point has substantial lag. Parts of the UI (a graph) require a few seconds to be fully loaded, whereas my stupid Ionic app renders much bigger graphs much faster, has no "saving" lag, works offline etc.

My point is: you can screw up a native app easily as well, especially if you don't keep in mind what's blocking and what is not. Sure, at the end of the day, you can squeeze more performance and a better feeling out of a fully native app than anything Cordova-based, but this 5-10% optimization is something that non-techies really don't care about (unless maybe your app has no other USP).

[com2kid]

None of my mobile phone apps look like any of my other mobile phone apps.

I've never really considered it to be a problem. The thing that looks like a play button makes the media start, the square makes the media stop. The speech bubble looking thing makes some sort of conversation happen, and the photo looking icon either opens a camera or lets me add a photo from my camera roll. That last one gets a bit annoying.

But I seriously don't care. So long as every app is consistent with itself. The number of apps that follow "platform guidelines" is astonishingly small, typically those from the OS creator (Google or Apple) and people who used the sample template and who didn't bother to customize anything.

Which is another thing, if an app looks too much like other apps, it looks cheap. Sure I want proper back button and keyboard integration (numeric inputs should use the numeric keyboard and so forth), but apps that look like they fell out of a sample catalog don't feel premium.

There isn't a consistent "this is how all retail stores are decorated" standard, there isn't a set of mandated "this is how all grocery stores are laid out" regulations, why in the world do people go around insisting that all apps should look the same?

Sure, use the default platform picker if it is appropriate, but if it isn't (and finding the year picker on the Android date picker is darn nearly an easter egg, and Android's keyboard entry for time is also not up to snuff), then use something else!

I give 0 cares if an app has properly rounded text inputs. What makes an app feel good is nice animations, no stutter performance, quick load times, and a self-consistent look and feel.

[ridiculous_fish]

When apps look and behave the same, it allows users to bring knowledge from one app to another, gradually developing into expertise.

The Mac has a profound depth of power-user acceleration: keyboard navigation, keyboard shortcuts, modifier keys, drag and drop, context menus, type-select, arrow keys, etc. Learning this stuff isn't wasted because it applies to every app (or at least that's the vision).

Controls look consistent, which signals to the user that their knowledge applies here.

Mobile obviously needs different UI paradigms, and yet it doesn't really have much of anything. There's still no good convention for basic operations like Undo. And part of the reason is that every app has to be a snowflake.

[ptx]

> The thing that looks like a play button makes the media start, the square makes the media stop.

This is an example of following an established convention, much like the conventions of the platform.

> But I seriously don't care. So long as every app is consistent with itself.

What if every app invented its own symbols for play and stop?

[com2kid]

> What if every app invented its own symbols for play and stop?

That'd suck.

But I don't care about the shadows, or lack of, on buttons.

Nor do I care about the exact animation that happens when transitioning between screens.

[dliff]

RN definitely feels native... assuming the developers utilized the built-in components properly. RN is an actual native component whose state is backed by a JS bridge.

There certainly are poorly written / optimized RN apps. There are also apps that due to their nature/goal shouldn't be RN even at an early stage. (Startup, navigation, threading, network issues for one). However, I would argue that a properly written RN app, within the confines of the problem RN attempts to solve, does not feel heavy and is actually indistinguishable from native.

From my experience I would surmise a lot of badly performing RN apps stem from poorly written JavaScript, especially bad state management (lots of devs who perhaps have only written web JS in the past?).

[monocularvision]

Except for navigation

[dliff]

Curious where this is an issue. React Navigation feels and is, according to their documentation, composed of native components.

Vs. what you can do natively it has severe limitations and the documentation isn't the best (though I think it has improved recently).. but feels native to me.

[afiori]

I am using a lot of apps that still have a jellybean feeling to them, if it does not crashes and it is not a swipe-hell (I have an underpowered phone) it is fine to me.

[pier25]

I use plenty of apps on both iOS and Android that do not use native controls such as Kindle and I really don't care as long as performance is good.

[lone_haxx0r]

To me, smartphones are like plungers: They are dirty, ugly (from a software perspective), and I don't like using them, but they are pretty convenient to have most of the time.

I only want them to get the job done and then get out of my sight, so I don't care about the UI being pretty. I would say "elegance is reserved for desktop PCs", but those are ugly too (x86 is horrible, all OSs suck).