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Ask HN: What do you think about app native vs. portable look-and-feel?

by ttd on 6/20/25, 4:06 PM with 12 comments

I'm curious how people feel these days about applications that use the platform's native UI toolkit, versus applications that use something platform-neutral like browser tech. I'm not really asking about the developer side of things, since that is its own discussion, but more on the user side.

My own views on this have evolved in the last 10 or so years. I used to vastly prefer applications using the platform's native UI controls, but at some point recently I realized I no longer really care all that much, and I don't think it factors in to my purchase or usage decisions anymore. I was actually surprised when I realized this.

Curious of others' opinions or perspectives.

  • by pellenys on 6/20/25, 6:56 PM

    I think usability almost always suffers when the native UI isn’t used. It’s not that platform-neutral UIs aren’t usable, or good looking. However when native UIs were prevalent, there were standards built up over years of hard-earned experience: for a Windows app, you wanted to get your tab order right, and you knew the convention of getting the Cancel button mapped to the escape key etc etc. See also the Mac and the HIG, encouraging apps to look and work roughly the same.

    There were always outliers and ugly UIs, but it always felt like there was a uniformity that made it easier to get around in an unfamiliar app. Whereas now, electron apps look and work very differently (comparing slack to Spotify to VSCode and so on).

    That said, I think very few people care as much as I do about it, and cross-platform UIs save a ton of development work.

  • by not_your_vase on 6/20/25, 5:04 PM

    Personally I'm obsessed with efficiency and performance - and platform specific native toolkits are rarely beaten at that. I really don't like seeing wasting many megabytes of (V)RAM and long seconds of CPU time just to display a marquee...

  • by muzani on 6/20/25, 10:55 PM

    I don't like the janky, laggy feel of multiplatform apps. I don't like it when I press back and the app quits instead of going to the previous screen. I don't like it when I go several pages deep into a SPA, like a comment, then press back a few times and find that I have not liked the comment until I refresh.

    A good enough team can handle all of this with any platform but I think the issue is that people who respect the experience use native, and those who want to cut costs don't.

  • by solardev on 6/22/25, 4:35 AM

    I hate non native apps (like Spotify, Slack, Teams, and to some extent browsers). That said, I think newer generations don't even know what native apps look like anymore. I can't think of any native desktop apps anymore except Office... and on mobile everything is different even when native.

  • by saluki on 6/20/25, 6:04 PM

    They look and feel similar to the user, I still think native is better but React Native looks and feels pro so I'm cool with it.

  • by brudgers on 6/20/25, 5:57 PM

    If the app is useful, nobody cares.

    If it isn’t useful, it doesn’t matter.

    Sure some developers have strong opinions about this…and if you are selling to developers those opinions matter (most commonly, a job interview ).

    But apps are gonna be shit for other reasons and the attraction of native-or-not is that fixing those reasons are much harder. Even when you choose to use theory to make GUI choice to add to complexity of development).

    Or to put it another way, the simplest thing that might work means you stay working instead of thinking (thinking != working). Good luck.

  • by bruce511 on 6/21/25, 4:39 AM

    I don't use a lot of apps. The ones I do are "not optional" (like my banking app etc.)

    Frankly, I couldn't care less about the UI looks or whether it's native or whatever. I get in, perform a task, get out.

    As long as I can do what I need to do, the buttons can be anything.

    I think developers care deeply about this. I think if you're in a competitive space then it matters. But I don't think Joe Public cares in the slightest.

    Performance yes. Usability yes. Ability to quickly do what I want, yes. Whether it uses native check boxes or owner-drawn check boxes? Nobody cares (for some definition of nobody. )

    Put another way, Usability is important. Yes it should look "nice". But at this point I probably don't know what the 'native UI' looks like. Nor do I care.