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I know the article says that mostly techies will care, but has there ever been research into seeing if normal users care about native? When I look at many apps

I know the article says that mostly techies will care, but has there ever been research into seeing if normal users care about native? When I look at many apps on the market, they are so heavily themed that the nativeness is hard to find. When I worked with Ionic one of the issues was how jarring it would be for people in iOS. Has anyone seen this concern become a reality?

WA 8y ago
Normal people don’t know the difference and even experienced people can be fooled. Anecdote: I have an Ionic app that is used by 15,000 people daily. It looks like a native app. Nobody ever wrote me an email that the app is not native, not fast enough or anything else. Normal people want to get their shit done and move on. Heck, one user apparently was a dev and came up with a suggestion (enable keyboard suggestions for text input fields) and he wrote me specifically which iOS UI element I should choose over some other element he thought I was using. I replied: thanks, but this is an Ionic app, it doesn’t use native iOS elements ;) Native apps are totally overrated imho, unless you make heavy use of fine-grained input controls. Here, Ionic does have its limits. You can’t control the keyboard properly for example, unless you wire in some Cordova plugins. Oh and JS doesn’t run in the background. This can cause issues if you do a lot of background processing. But performance is not much of an issue anymore in 2018 and Ionic is the most polished web-based framework that is tough to distinguish from native apps.
- yesimahuman 8y ago
  (Ionic CEO here) Thanks for the response and sharing your experience. I also have not heard any feedback that iOS users find Ionic's iOS styles jarring. Ionic is also meant to be customized and branded quite a bit, so stock native style isn't really what we're after anyways. A priority for us in 2019 is making keyboard and background processing easier!
  - virmundi 8y ago
    I phrased that poorly. I personally liked the look of Ionic. I read Medium post after Medium post while researching telling me I'm crazy to use Ionic since iOS people pay for apps and demand native appearance.
    - yesimahuman 8y ago
      Interesting, well considering even a side menu isn’t official Apple UI that might be a case of native engineers projecting their own opinions on developers. Hard to say
  - WA 8y ago
    Interesting. I haven’t written more than 5 lines of custom CSS. Besides changing the primary color, it’s all Ionic stock styles.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Just curious, what app is this? I’ve generally been of the opinion that it’s very hard to make native-looking Ionic apps.
  - WA 8y ago
    Most apps are 90% table views, buttons, lists, images, nav controller transitions or modal slideups. Since Ionic gets all of these pretty much right, every Ionic app that makes heavy use of these components will look like a native app. I won’t post my app here, since this leads to opinionated discussions that serve no purpose. You will always find something that looks off (but you can find off-looking things also in pure native apps). So to turn the question back to you: what bothers you and what makes it hard to have native-looking apps?
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      > Most apps are 90% table views, buttons, lists, images, nav controller transitions or modal slideups. Since Ionic gets all of these pretty much right, every Ionic app that makes heavy use of these components will look like a native app. I took a look at this again today, using a demo I found online: http://ionic-team.github.io/ionic-conference-app/www/ http://ionic-team.github.io/ionic-conference-app/www/, which I converted to a web app by adding it to my homescreen. Please let me know if this isn't representative of the current state of Ionic development. Here's just a few of the things that seemed broken/were wrong: * I can't scroll to the top by tapping the top of the screen. * The appearance and behavior of the search bar is incorrect. * The size of the segmented control in the navigation bar is incorrect. * Scrolling the menu frequently breaks completely–as in, I can't scroll at all. This also happens in the "Filter sessions" page. * Swiping on switches doesn't match the system behavior: I should not be able to move it until I lift my finger. The animation that changes the switches from "wide" to "circular" isn't correct either. * I broke the scrollbar insets on the support page. * I can scroll the navigation bar out of the viewport. * The background color for pickers is wrong. * The location from where a backwards swipe can begin is wrong. * The touch target on bar buttons is too small. * There is no vibrancy at all. And from a stylistic point of view: * Floating action buttons are for Android, not iOS. * Hamburger menus that duplicate the function of the tab bar are frowned upon. * Table view selection isn't correct–it deselects itself too quickly. * Buttons should be render before the view loads, not after.
saagarjha 8y ago
My experience has been that they do care, but not in the way you’d think: they will voice their concerns as the app breaking something they expected to work, it being slow or laggy, or “not looking right”. They don’t know what’s going in the background but they can usually figure out the effects that it has on their experience.
- WA 8y ago
  Is this really your experience or are you stating what other devs say what their experience is? Because slow and laggy are no issues, especially on iOS with insane JS performance. "Not looking right“ – I have never had a single email or review saying this. Normal people care about the tasks they can complete with your app and maybe missing features, but not small UI details. And furthermore: even small details that aren’t perfectly polished aren’t necessarily a deal breaker. But of course, it depends whether or not your app is exchangeable and lots of competitors offer a similar experience or not (where polish maybe matters more). I had great success by having my app generally different from the others. But I have to admit that it’s a niche app and not for the mass market.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > Is this really your experience or are you stating what other devs say what their experience is? Both. > Because slow and laggy are no issues, especially on iOS with insane JS performance. Not every iOS device can say this. And there are certain things that a webview just cannot do performantly, no matter how fast JavaScriptCore is. > "Not looking right“ – I have never had a single email or review saying this. People will not generally voice this to you, especially since they may not know what about the app looks wrong to them. But they might be put off from using it, or at least dislike it, without telling you. > Normal people care about the tasks they can complete with your app and maybe missing features, but not small UI details. I really believe that both things are important, especially since small UI details might sometimes be things that are important to them. Take accessibility support, for example, or inclusion of keyboard shortcuts. > And furthermore: even small details that aren’t perfectly polished aren’t necessarily a deal breaker. But of course, it depends whether or not your app is exchangeable and lots of competitors offer a similar experience or not (where polish maybe matters more). This is true, obviously, but in my experience, at least on iOS, polish is very important. Apollo, the Reddit app, is a good example: it's has found a niche where people use it over competitors because it's more polished (it's not enough for me, but I'm especially picky.)

WA 8y ago

Normal people don’t know the difference and even experienced people can be fooled. Anecdote: I have an Ionic app that is used by 15,000 people daily. It looks like a native app. Nobody ever wrote me an email that the app is not native, not fast enough or anything else. Normal people want to get their shit done and move on. Heck, one user apparently was a dev and came up with a suggestion (enable keyboard suggestions for text input fields) and he wrote me specifically which iOS UI element I should choose over some other element he thought I was using. I replied: thanks, but this is an Ionic app, it doesn’t use native iOS elements ;) Native apps are totally overrated imho, unless you make heavy use of fine-grained input controls. Here, Ionic does have its limits. You can’t control the keyboard properly for example, unless you wire in some Cordova plugins. Oh and JS doesn’t run in the background. This can cause issues if you do a lot of background processing. But performance is not much of an issue anymore in 2018 and Ionic is the most polished web-based framework that is tough to distinguish from native apps.

yesimahuman 8y ago
(Ionic CEO here) Thanks for the response and sharing your experience. I also have not heard any feedback that iOS users find Ionic's iOS styles jarring. Ionic is also meant to be customized and branded quite a bit, so stock native style isn't really what we're after anyways. A priority for us in 2019 is making keyboard and background processing easier!
- virmundi 8y ago
  I phrased that poorly. I personally liked the look of Ionic. I read Medium post after Medium post while researching telling me I'm crazy to use Ionic since iOS people pay for apps and demand native appearance.
  - yesimahuman 8y ago
    Interesting, well considering even a side menu isn’t official Apple UI that might be a case of native engineers projecting their own opinions on developers. Hard to say
- WA 8y ago
  Interesting. I haven’t written more than 5 lines of custom CSS. Besides changing the primary color, it’s all Ionic stock styles.
saagarjha 8y ago
Just curious, what app is this? I’ve generally been of the opinion that it’s very hard to make native-looking Ionic apps.
- WA 8y ago
  Most apps are 90% table views, buttons, lists, images, nav controller transitions or modal slideups. Since Ionic gets all of these pretty much right, every Ionic app that makes heavy use of these components will look like a native app. I won’t post my app here, since this leads to opinionated discussions that serve no purpose. You will always find something that looks off (but you can find off-looking things also in pure native apps). So to turn the question back to you: what bothers you and what makes it hard to have native-looking apps?
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > Most apps are 90% table views, buttons, lists, images, nav controller transitions or modal slideups. Since Ionic gets all of these pretty much right, every Ionic app that makes heavy use of these components will look like a native app. I took a look at this again today, using a demo I found online: http://ionic-team.github.io/ionic-conference-app/www/ http://ionic-team.github.io/ionic-conference-app/www/, which I converted to a web app by adding it to my homescreen. Please let me know if this isn't representative of the current state of Ionic development. Here's just a few of the things that seemed broken/were wrong: * I can't scroll to the top by tapping the top of the screen. * The appearance and behavior of the search bar is incorrect. * The size of the segmented control in the navigation bar is incorrect. * Scrolling the menu frequently breaks completely–as in, I can't scroll at all. This also happens in the "Filter sessions" page. * Swiping on switches doesn't match the system behavior: I should not be able to move it until I lift my finger. The animation that changes the switches from "wide" to "circular" isn't correct either. * I broke the scrollbar insets on the support page. * I can scroll the navigation bar out of the viewport. * The background color for pickers is wrong. * The location from where a backwards swipe can begin is wrong. * The touch target on bar buttons is too small. * There is no vibrancy at all. And from a stylistic point of view: * Floating action buttons are for Android, not iOS. * Hamburger menus that duplicate the function of the tab bar are frowned upon. * Table view selection isn't correct–it deselects itself too quickly. * Buttons should be render before the view loads, not after.

saagarjha 8y ago

My experience has been that they do care, but not in the way you’d think: they will voice their concerns as the app breaking something they expected to work, it being slow or laggy, or “not looking right”. They don’t know what’s going in the background but they can usually figure out the effects that it has on their experience.

WA 8y ago
Is this really your experience or are you stating what other devs say what their experience is? Because slow and laggy are no issues, especially on iOS with insane JS performance. "Not looking right“ – I have never had a single email or review saying this. Normal people care about the tasks they can complete with your app and maybe missing features, but not small UI details. And furthermore: even small details that aren’t perfectly polished aren’t necessarily a deal breaker. But of course, it depends whether or not your app is exchangeable and lots of competitors offer a similar experience or not (where polish maybe matters more). I had great success by having my app generally different from the others. But I have to admit that it’s a niche app and not for the mass market.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > Is this really your experience or are you stating what other devs say what their experience is? Both. > Because slow and laggy are no issues, especially on iOS with insane JS performance. Not every iOS device can say this. And there are certain things that a webview just cannot do performantly, no matter how fast JavaScriptCore is. > "Not looking right“ – I have never had a single email or review saying this. People will not generally voice this to you, especially since they may not know what about the app looks wrong to them. But they might be put off from using it, or at least dislike it, without telling you. > Normal people care about the tasks they can complete with your app and maybe missing features, but not small UI details. I really believe that both things are important, especially since small UI details might sometimes be things that are important to them. Take accessibility support, for example, or inclusion of keyboard shortcuts. > And furthermore: even small details that aren’t perfectly polished aren’t necessarily a deal breaker. But of course, it depends whether or not your app is exchangeable and lots of competitors offer a similar experience or not (where polish maybe matters more). This is true, obviously, but in my experience, at least on iOS, polish is very important. Apollo, the Reddit app, is a good example: it's has found a niche where people use it over competitors because it's more polished (it's not enough for me, but I'm especially picky.)