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Only on HN do I hear anyone talking about platform native controls versus unified UI across devices. I have not once heard of such a complaint in the real world

Only on HN do I hear anyone talking about platform native controls versus unified UI across devices. I have not once heard of such a complaint in the real world and indeed, I have more often heard users wanting a unified UI over one that changes with each platform, simply because these days we have multiple devices where we expect apps to work the same.

pastage 2y ago
You have to listen to the details, like "where is the back button", "Why does text work differently". There are some people that understand that it is different from the standard, but most just get annoyed. The discussion here is from a technical perspective why it is better, conformity of the app on different platforms vs standard behavior between different apps. There are very few people that care about the technical reasons why, but when you talk about the annoyances it is easier.
- milch 2y ago
  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
  - basilgohar 2y ago
    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.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      I'm not quite sure why this was downvoted. It's true.
      - satvikpendem 2y ago
        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.
        robertlagrant 2y ago
        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.
        kelnos 2y ago
        Right, but you continually conflate "unified experience" with "using custom UI controls".
        satvikpendem 2y ago
        I never said they must be custom, merely that custom makes it easier to implement.
    - dickersnoodle 2y ago
      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.
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    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.
  - maeil 2y ago
    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.
  - nl 2y ago
    I use MacOS, iOS and desktop Linux regularly and much prefer apps that act the same on them all. Maybe 40% of the developers I know use MacOS + Android.
  - satvikpendem 2y ago
    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.
    - Someone 2y ago
      > 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.
      - kibwen 2y ago
        > You shouldn’t trust what users say they want. How should I interpret the following four paragraphs where you say what you want?
      - satvikpendem 2y ago
        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.
  - naasking 2y ago
    > 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.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  I've genuinely never heard of such annoyances from actual users (at least not from most users, who aren't power users, and even then, not even from the power users), and most cross platform frameworks already hook into the native APIs like for the back button, so it'd work the same either way.
CJefferson 2y ago
Out of interest, do you know many seriously vision-impared people? Windows, and Mac OS X in particular, have quite good support for accessibility if you use their built-in GUI systems, and unified UIs are often (not always, vscode and chrome are quite good, for example), very bad, sometimes just a black square as far as accessibility goes.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  Many cross platform frameworks have good accessibility support, not sure what that has to do with native platforms, as the cross platform solutions simply hook into the native platform accessibility APIs anyway. https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility-and-internationalization/accessibility https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility-and-internationali...
  - CJefferson 2y ago
    I didn't know flutter had such good support, and I'm very happy to hear about it! Unfortunately, most cross-platform frameworks have awful accessibility support, I've looked at various in the past and just found failure after failure. I am now going to look harder at flutter.
kelnos 2y ago
People have multiple devices, sure, but in my experience (among non-HN people) it's iPhone+iPad or iPhone+mac dominating, with a decent contingent of iPhone+Windows, and rarely Android+Windows. (This is of course US-centric; the iPhone is more popular as a mobile platform, and that often entices people to buy into other aspects of the Apple ecosystem.) It is exceedingly rare for the multiple devices to span the UI toolkits of more than one or two company-platform. For people in the Apple ecosystem, they don't want to see something that looks like it belongs on Android. Regardless, "unified UI" doesn't mean it can't use native controls. More important from a UX perspective is that controls are in the same places and behave similarly, and that the app is organized in a similar manner, plus or minus what might naturally change because of differences in screen size and input method. And that's another useful point to make too: mobile, tablet, and desktop experiences are often quite different, and that's normal and expected at this point. Another consideration: it's a lot more difficult to make an accessible app when you draw your own custom UI controls with your own custom behavior. If you use the native UI controls, you get a lot of the accessibility features for free, and have to do much less work to make sure everything works for people who are vision or mobility impaired. From what I understand after reading about blind people's experiences on various platforms, most companies that do custom UI don't bother, and the accessibility of their apps is atrocious.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  I think you made the same points twice so refer to my other reply regarding your first few paragraphs. > For people in the Apple ecosystem, they don't want to see something that looks like it belongs on Android. I have not seen evidence among normal people that this is true, given that the most popular apps all have custom UIs that don't necessarily follow Apple's HIG, TikTok for example. Regardless, the point is that if you're making an app for every platform like iOS, Android, Windows etc, you must make a choice lest you exclude all non-Apple users for example. ByteDance does therefore indeed use Flutter, based on this (at least in some capacity). > mobile, tablet, and desktop experiences are often quite different Don't conflate unified UI to mean non responsiveness. Look at Spotify, their UI is essentially the same in design except it is responsive among mobile, tablet and desktop, all while not looking native at all on any of them. Regarding accessibility, many frameworks can be robust in that simply because they hook into the native implementation anyway, so I'm not sure where this trope of not having accessibility comes from. Here is Flutter's for example, with a dev in this thread also having talked about how they have one of the most robust implementations of accessibility that they have found among any framework: https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility-and-internationalization/accessibility https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility-and-internationali...

pastage 2y ago

You have to listen to the details, like "where is the back button", "Why does text work differently". There are some people that understand that it is different from the standard, but most just get annoyed. The discussion here is from a technical perspective why it is better, conformity of the app on different platforms vs standard behavior between different apps. There are very few people that care about the technical reasons why, but when you talk about the annoyances it is easier.

milch 2y ago
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
- basilgohar 2y ago
  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.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    I'm not quite sure why this was downvoted. It's true.
    - satvikpendem 2y ago
      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.
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        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.
      - kelnos 2y ago
        Right, but you continually conflate "unified experience" with "using custom UI controls".
        satvikpendem 2y ago
        I never said they must be custom, merely that custom makes it easier to implement.
  - dickersnoodle 2y ago
    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.
- zdragnar 2y ago
  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.
- maeil 2y ago
  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.
- nl 2y ago
  I use MacOS, iOS and desktop Linux regularly and much prefer apps that act the same on them all. Maybe 40% of the developers I know use MacOS + Android.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  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.
  - Someone 2y ago
    > 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.
    - kibwen 2y ago
      > You shouldn’t trust what users say they want. How should I interpret the following four paragraphs where you say what you want?
    - satvikpendem 2y ago
      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.
- naasking 2y ago
  > 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.
satvikpendem 2y ago
I've genuinely never heard of such annoyances from actual users (at least not from most users, who aren't power users, and even then, not even from the power users), and most cross platform frameworks already hook into the native APIs like for the back button, so it'd work the same either way.

CJefferson 2y ago

Out of interest, do you know many seriously vision-impared people? Windows, and Mac OS X in particular, have quite good support for accessibility if you use their built-in GUI systems, and unified UIs are often (not always, vscode and chrome are quite good, for example), very bad, sometimes just a black square as far as accessibility goes.

satvikpendem 2y ago
Many cross platform frameworks have good accessibility support, not sure what that has to do with native platforms, as the cross platform solutions simply hook into the native platform accessibility APIs anyway. https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility-and-internationalization/accessibility https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility-and-internationali...
- CJefferson 2y ago
  I didn't know flutter had such good support, and I'm very happy to hear about it! Unfortunately, most cross-platform frameworks have awful accessibility support, I've looked at various in the past and just found failure after failure. I am now going to look harder at flutter.

kelnos 2y ago

People have multiple devices, sure, but in my experience (among non-HN people) it's iPhone+iPad or iPhone+mac dominating, with a decent contingent of iPhone+Windows, and rarely Android+Windows. (This is of course US-centric; the iPhone is more popular as a mobile platform, and that often entices people to buy into other aspects of the Apple ecosystem.) It is exceedingly rare for the multiple devices to span the UI toolkits of more than one or two company-platform. For people in the Apple ecosystem, they don't want to see something that looks like it belongs on Android. Regardless, "unified UI" doesn't mean it can't use native controls. More important from a UX perspective is that controls are in the same places and behave similarly, and that the app is organized in a similar manner, plus or minus what might naturally change because of differences in screen size and input method. And that's another useful point to make too: mobile, tablet, and desktop experiences are often quite different, and that's normal and expected at this point. Another consideration: it's a lot more difficult to make an accessible app when you draw your own custom UI controls with your own custom behavior. If you use the native UI controls, you get a lot of the accessibility features for free, and have to do much less work to make sure everything works for people who are vision or mobility impaired. From what I understand after reading about blind people's experiences on various platforms, most companies that do custom UI don't bother, and the accessibility of their apps is atrocious.

satvikpendem 2y ago
I think you made the same points twice so refer to my other reply regarding your first few paragraphs. > For people in the Apple ecosystem, they don't want to see something that looks like it belongs on Android. I have not seen evidence among normal people that this is true, given that the most popular apps all have custom UIs that don't necessarily follow Apple's HIG, TikTok for example. Regardless, the point is that if you're making an app for every platform like iOS, Android, Windows etc, you must make a choice lest you exclude all non-Apple users for example. ByteDance does therefore indeed use Flutter, based on this (at least in some capacity). > mobile, tablet, and desktop experiences are often quite different Don't conflate unified UI to mean non responsiveness. Look at Spotify, their UI is essentially the same in design except it is responsive among mobile, tablet and desktop, all while not looking native at all on any of them. Regarding accessibility, many frameworks can be robust in that simply because they hook into the native implementation anyway, so I'm not sure where this trope of not having accessibility comes from. Here is Flutter's for example, with a dev in this thread also having talked about how they have one of the most robust implementations of accessibility that they have found among any framework: https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility-and-internationalization/accessibility https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility-and-internationali...