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This is less fashionable now in the era of Electron apps - users are starting to expect apps that look _the same_ everywhere. See VSCode, Discord, Spotify...

This is less fashionable now in the era of Electron apps - users are starting to expect apps that look _the same_ everywhere. See VSCode, Discord, Spotify... It's easier to get a single code-base that 'just works' across platforms if you have an abstraction that is truly cross-platform. One of the major value propositions of developing with Electron is this ability to develop cross-platform 'with confidence' - I can build an app on Windows and be 99% sure it's going to look function the same on OSX / Linux. > I want my macOS apps to use Mac-native UI elements, and Windows apps to use Windows-native UI elements That's a fine goal but it means you end up needing more platform-specific code. It's a trade-off, and there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution.

zapzupnz 7y ago
But do people expect the apps to look the same? I think people want them to behave the same with a few visual features kept intact. To take Discord as an example, I don't know that people actually can't live without the UI slavishly copied for every platform; I think people rather want light and dark themes on all platforms, message formatting to look basically the same, and for everything to be found in roughly the same place. This idea that users expect apps to look the same is, I feel sure, something someone said and everybody has gone along with. In my experience, people want things to behave consistently — so if Discord had a native Windows client and a native macOS client, people would be more interested in whether or not they could still find the little microphone and headphone buttons at the lower-left of the screen, sod if the icons and colours are identical.