Sure, but at the risk of more snark - are you building a new paradigm for computing interaction, or are you building an app to add kitten ears to selfies? One

Sure, but at the risk of more snark - are you building a new paradigm for computing interaction, or are you building an app to add kitten ears to selfies? One of the more pernicious things I've seen from mobile developers and mobile designers (including myself from time to time) is that we all want to work on some Cool Ass Shit(tm), but not every app we get to work on is some groundbreaking advancement, and so we see a lot of very non-standard UIs that violate a whole lot of established conventions on apps that are supposed to be very straight-forward. This is also very commonly justified under the guise of "branding", as if featuring a UX that's wildly inconsistent with the entire rest of the platform is an exercise in marketing (see: AirBnb's old app navigation, where screens shrunk and with 3D perspective flew off to one edge... that's just switching between sections) Yes, there are scenarios in which you really must break the rules, or that breaking the rules will result in a substantially better experience in the long run. These scenarios are few and far between, and I suppose my main complaint is that app developers seem to have an inflated judgment of whether or not their scenarios (which are usually fairly straightforward) fit the description. A good example of this I think is Tinder: the card-swiping UI was definitely new at the time (and cloned inappropriately to a disturbing amount, but I digress), and IMO was well justified. More importantly, the rest of the app is very by the numbers - they knew they were breaking a huge convention and so they built around it. Many, many apps are guilty of not only breaking conventions, but breaking many unrelated conventions all at once, resulting in a mess of shit that nobody can figure out how to use without resorting to heavy-handed tutorials.