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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

The article explicitly covered that point. MS used to say the same thing.

As an iOS user, it's still jarring as hell to have a native app feel like something from other OS. I don't want to learn another platform's conventions to use my own platform.

On Android it makes sense, they make android. On the web it's OK because websites all look different. But all iOS apps generally work the same and when you stand out it's annoying.

You know all those people who complain about Java applications not feeling right? Yeah, same kind of thing. As a long time Mac user you can tell when the program you're using is a lazy port from Windows because it doesn't fit in.

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The funny thing is that Microsoft had a tendency to do the same thing on their own OS.

For example, Office would come out with some new paradigm – draggable toolbars, for example – that didn't exist anywhere else in Windows, and wasn't part of the standard libraries that other developers had access to. They'd use that for a while, and slowly those features would make their way into other Windows apps (first- and third-party), and right when that started to get standardized, Office would do something else – like the ribbon – which, again, didn't exist anywhere else.

In other words, Microsoft had a tendency to eschew standard OS behaviours even on their own OS, and kept pushing the bar by making new UI paradigms as fast as everyone else could try and keep consistency with them.

but if you're a docs user wouldn't you expect docs to look and feel the same everywhere? That's the choice google has to make. Do we worry about our app matching YOUR OS's design patterns, or do we keep our applications consistent across all platforms?

I expect the content of my document to look the same everywhere.

I expect the app that I use to view my document to behave like other apps on the platform.

It is Google's choice to make, the article is arguing that they made a poor choice. They can still make the app very Google-y in looks and organization but make it much nicer for iOS users by following a few platform conventions.

There is a very wide variety of iOS apps that look completely different but feel similar due to following the guidelines. Google should be able to fit into that.

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