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I think the one word that sums it up is ‘safe.’ Few people would be willing to spend millions developing an app, then risk it all letting someone express themself. The NYT lower stakes lets them be better.

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I think you're on to something here. An image on the NYT website has a viewership that decays exponentially over a couple of days. And NYT gets to cycle through dozens of articles every day. So, images are designed to hook a user's attention, and even if happens to be annoying, nobody looks at it after a day or two.

On the other hand, an app's interface is something the users look at for a much more extended period.

To compare with newspapers, think about the web interface of different newspapers (or even the layout of most print newspapers) -- you'll be amazed at how similar they are! I just looked at: https://www.nytimes.com/ , https://www.washingtonpost.com/ , https://www.bostonglobe.com/

So, while I would like more variety in interfaces, I think it's a very hard problem.

I think that idea of people in tech that designer is expressing himself when doing app design might be part of answer. We see it as something suspect, waste of time. Technical graphical design is not designer expressing himself. It is more about what target audience likes and is attracted to.

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