If you are a software engineer with no sense of design, do make it like Google. Material Design allows anybody to put something together that looks half decent, is somewhat consistent and familiar with users.
For each of the major platforms, following the guidelines will at least make your app consistent with the other apps on the user's device, which is a decent-enough baseline. Going wild and re-inventing how a drop-down should look or how scrolling should work is probably just going to annoy the user.