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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

> Liquid Glass isn't an optional decoration, it's the name of the new system-wide UI

Of course it’s optional. Some of the most popular apps on the planet ignore the local UI conventions of their parent OSes entirely.

TikTok is a Flutter app. It looks identical on iOS and Android. It uses basically no native UI elements.

It’s a pretty well-known strategy to create apps that look identical on all platforms so that you lessen your customer confusion and your support burden. The fact that Spotify, Facebook, Uber, and Reddit look exactly the same no matter what platform you’re on is more important than complying with OS design guidelines and UI elements.

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> Spotify, Facebook, Uber, and Reddit

And I hate every one of those apps (well, back when I used Facebook, years ago, I did), because they’re just bad iOS citizens. I, as most iOS users do, don’t care what apps look on Android. For Android users, it’s the same with iOS. Making shitty cross platform apps is all about branding and saving some money for developers, nothing about the users.

It’s cool that you are a non-conformist badass but their wild popularity proves that a native app experience doesn’t matter.

What does “bad iOS citizen” even mean?

It’s not even about saving money for developers, it’s about the fact that your users expect a consistent experience.

Imagine if you watched an NFL game on NBC and the on-screen graphics were different if you were watching on a Samsung TV versus an LG TV. That’s the issue with native app UI elements (and it would quite literally be an issue with content apps on smart TV app platforms which are way more fragmented than iOS versus Android).

Your conclusion is false, as you’re mixing stuff that shouldn’t be mixed here:

1. Spotify, Uber etc are popular because of their product, not the pure quality of their apps. People use Uber because they want to cheaply get somewhere, and Spotify cause that’s there all their shared playlists are.

2. People buy whatever tv is on sale when their old one breaks, but the vast majority will stay with their phone platform, so couldn’t care less what their apps look on the other platforms out there.

So, native experience does matter, but obviously only as one of multiple deciding factors.

> What does “bad iOS citizen” even mean?

Doesn’t look like native apps, doesn’t feel like native apps (come on, most multi platform frameworks don’t even get the scrolling right, one of the most basic forms of interaction), doesn’t use all of the platforms features to their fullest, as applicable for the type of app.

What I meant to say in my original message is that if you are using system default-ish iOS UI styling, Liquid Glass is not optional decoration. If you have your entirely own UI and design system, sure you don't need it. But many of these Flutter apps or other such toolkits are using it to approximate system default UI except either without the Liquid Glass parts or with uncanny and incomplete approximations of it.

Exactly. Branding and UX are breaking out of the box for guidelines in the successful platforms. You want to be able to pick up any device and have the user know exactly what theyre doing

Thank God I’m only using web versions whenever possible.

Which also have consistent branding and UX with the apps.

That's fine, as long as I have native OS dialogs/settings.

I thought TikTok used native implementations and Lynx (their cross-platform framework)

I dunno, the ByteDance logo is on the Flutter web page.

But it really doesn’t matter either way. The point is that TikTok doesn’t follow any OS conventions.

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