> The OS has an established design language and really should be used for most applications.
This is a valid point.
The other side of the story is that the iOS ecosystem is a marketplace where merchants offer goods and services, including Apple themselves.
Apple increasingly wants to decide how you present your brand, to the point that the only brand-language Apple allows on its devices is its own.
I think it's reasonable that merchants in this marketplace feel the increased pressure to work less on creating and refining their own identity and more on normalizing their offer like it could come directly from Apple, at their own expense and financial risk.
On a phone, it can be tempting for an app developer to approach design as if their app is temporarily taking over the phone and transforming the entire device into the custom gadget your app embodies, since the app's UI will be filling almost the entire screen. On a desktop, it's more obvious that an app should instead strive to coexist alongside (literally) other apps and the rest of the OS.
But in either case, ignoring the platform's established design language and UI conventions is still wrong, and not taking advantage of the user's preexisting knowledge about how to use their device is a wasted opportunity at best, insulting at worst. If the only reason for doing so is that you are placing your "brand identity" over actual usability and insist that your app look and feel the same on any device regardless of context, that's at the insulting hubris end of the spectrum. Given how widespread that problem is, it seems entirely appropriate and deserved for app developers to feel pressure from Apple (or any other OS vendor) to put more effort into conforming. We as users shouldn't want any app ecosystem to fragment into the mid-2000s WWW full of Flash UIs with zero accessibility.
> ignoring the platform's established design language and UI conventions is still wrong, and not taking advantage of the user's preexisting knowledge about how to use their device is a wasted opportunity at best, insulting at worst.
What valuable preexisting knowledge is ignored if you make your button text readable instead of being blurred with the glassy background?
Consider the simple case on a desktop OS of how to arrange the "OK" and "Cancel" buttons on a dialog box. For an experienced user of the platform, it doesn't actually matter at all how legible your button labels are, you're going to cause problems if they're in the wrong place. The platform conventions when used properly allow the user to entirely skip reading those button labels.
Obviously, if Apple's committed to taking their UI in the direction of illegibility again, then deviating from their new recommendations may be worthwhile. But the UI design should start by complying with platform conventions, and only break those to the smallest extent necessary, with good reason (which doesn't usually include anything about your app's brand identity). And hopefully, Apple can speed-run the kind of changes they did over the first several years of OS X as they toned down the initial excesses of the Aqua design.
> The platform conventions when used properly allow the user to entirely skip reading those button labels.
No it doesn't since you don't know whether the app is following that convention, so you need to read the label. Besides I don't think it's even possible to avoid reading a short label while looking at it.
> Consider ... how to arrange the "OK"
This isn't the topic, though, this is:
> Apple's committed to taking their UI in the direction of illegibility
> which doesn't usually include anything about your app's brand identity
Do you have a good example here as to me dentity in design is mostly about color theme and maybe a few shape tweaks, which has almost no usability impact?
Or that on Apple platforms, you are not supposed to use "OK" as a button, but rather the action it is going to perform (e.g. "Delete").
Using non-standard labelling _and_ putting buttons in their non-standard order is a real issue.
Not to mention that on some platforms the position of the buttons may be specific to localization, e.g. they may switch order if the user's language is set to Hebrew.
On Mac, the coloring indicates which action is triggered by default with the keyboard - one of the first things to go if you stylize the UI yourself.
These and all the other inconsistencies add up until you have something like the iOS Youtube app, where IMHO the UI is just complete nonsense. Just because you are full screen doesn't mean you can redefine fundamentals about how information is laid out or what taps are supposed to do.
I understand the rant, but disagree on the black/white framing of the topic.
A company like Netflix may have its own experience and expectation on UX for the service it offers, and it might be equally valid for them to want a consistent UX across all its devices carrying Netflix as it is for Apple to want it across all of Apples devices.
But here Apple attempts to define the UX for its devices AND the services offered there. This might be useful and even helpful for the ecosystem when the guidelines are reasonable and supportive of the ecosystem.
But when Apple suddenly defines "everything should be frosted glass!" and their design language no longer intends to "get out of the way" but "emphasize Apple above all", it becomes branding, creating a collision of interests...
If I'm using Excel or Spotify or just about any application, I would much rather it look the same across operating systems, than try to match each operating system.
I'm going to assume you don't want Excel to look the same on your desktop as on your phone. But even between Windows and macOS, I find it hard to believe you don't want at least a reasonable baseline of appropriate native behavior.
Are you primarily a Windows user and just want the app on macOS to look and feel like the Windows environment you're used to—essentially wishing there weren't different platforms to begin with, but otherwise dodging the issue? How would you feel if you encountered a macOS-style open/save dialog while working on Windows? Or if an application tried to attach its menus to the top of the screen instead of the top of each of its windows? Or if it responded to Ctrl-C by cancelling an operation instead of copying what you had selected? Or if the window close button was in the wrong corner?
You're just prejudging the answer. Who wouldn't want reasonable and appropriate? The issue is that a lot of these platform-specific defaults are bad unergonomic legacy
Case in point: "Or if the window close button was in the wrong corner?" That would be great to have on any platform since it's a common UI mistake to clump categorically different buttons (non-destructive minimize and destructive close) together, thus raising the cost of a misclick
That's the main issue with your argument - yes, familiarity is a UI benefit, but the net benefit of following a UI convention depends entirely on said convention.
I agree that there usually needs to be some level of OS consistency - using system file dialogs, keyboard shortcuts, etc. - but I don't think it extends to aesthetics.
I used to think like that because it's very much a core tenet of the mac/apple ideology (it's basically a form of narcissism at the level of a brand).
But the actual reality is that the OS does not matter that much. The application is actually what's useful and exactly why we are even using the computer in the first place. The OS is just a middle man that we can't really cut out but should make itself as transparent as possible.
It follows then that the UI should be designed around the needs of the application and that it should be translated/transposed/copied across platforms regardless of the primary look of the platform. And this is exactly the problem with Apple stuff, focusing too much on superficial aesthetics at the expense of more substantial usefulness.
For example, if Apple hadn't decided to completely re-skin their whole office suite to make it "mobile ready", maybe they could have worked on the actual feature set and performance (awful in both cases against the offering of Microsoft).
Ironically, when Apple ported iTunes to Windows, they did a perfect copy paste, going through the trouble of creating their own UI framework specifically for Windows. So, it seems that their requirement/demands only applies to others, never themselves.
This is a valid point.
The other side of the story is that the iOS ecosystem is a marketplace where merchants offer goods and services, including Apple themselves.
Apple increasingly wants to decide how you present your brand, to the point that the only brand-language Apple allows on its devices is its own.
I think it's reasonable that merchants in this marketplace feel the increased pressure to work less on creating and refining their own identity and more on normalizing their offer like it could come directly from Apple, at their own expense and financial risk.