Strongly disagree. How is a consistent user experience enabling developers to support more platforms at a higher level of quality going to lead to worse end-user experience?
To me: it's not, this is just anti-browser sentiment dressing itself up as enlightenment
> ... higher level of quality going to lead to worse end-user experience
This is just a management speak where degradation in quality is called 'next generation'. It is worse because it is resource hog and slow even on high end machines.
As a technical user I understand at least what is happening. On other hand non-technical folks are unable to articulate their frustrations which slick developers seems to take as users are satisfied.
and more, then what does this matter? Each choice made in such a domain as this is picking a point in a high-dimensional tradespace, and to blatantly disregard this obvious perspective citing "management speak" and "slick developers" doesn't really inspire confidence you're arguing in good faith
That's just one factor and while it may be true, do you really think that is more important that dramatically higher overall developer velocity and superior developer workflow, both of which contribute to more feature refinement, fewer bugs, faster updates, better support, etc, etc? Definitely not IMO. The fact that you are ignoring those other factors in your comments makes me think you are also ignoring them in your assessment of the options.
> For the actual user, the experience is inconsistent with the rest of their system.
This point is moot. If your argument is that each system has its own GUI semantics, and the developer fails the user by not developing within those semantics for that platform, then you are proposing the developer must do 1 unit of work per platform where previously it was 1 unit of work for all platforms. Therefore exactly 1 platform will be supported, and users on the unlucky ones will have exactly no experiences with this tool.
Or you can use cross-platform solutions which are themselves good tools, and disregard platform-specific semantics in favor of globally good UI/UX and let your tool stand on its own with no need for unnecessary, repetitive, error-prone platform porting.
Can you make a supporting argument for this? You state it as fact. I do not see why globally strong UI/UX should be a bad thing for users just because it disregards some standards of unknown quality on an unknown platform. Most methods of interacting with applications today are standardized and have no platform reliance; it is unclear to me why a developer whose tool delivers value in and of itself would suddenly not be delivering value to users just because their UI implementation did not perfectly match said user's preferred OS' UI standards. Actually, it's perfectly clear to me that the opposite is true.
> I do not see why globally strong UI/UX should be a bad thing for users
Except "globally strong UI/UX" is usually just design wankery that totally ignores decades of usability studies.
> just because it disregards some standards of unknown quality on an unknown platform.
Yeah, because the bleeding Windows UI guidelines that were in force for decades and known by hundreds of millions -- or are we in billions territory? Probably -- of users are "some standards of unknown quality on an unknown platform" nowadays.
Maybe you shouldn't revert to facile claims which don't even support your point, such as implying that a single good platform with good standards justifies never building anything cross-platform ever in any context?
> For the actual user, the experience is inconsistent with the rest of their system
Hmm... is that actually true though? If so, in what way?
For example, right now I have open, among other things, Spotify, Visual Studio, Vim, Chrome, and the Windows 10 Settings app. It's a fairly big mishmash of UIs in terms of styling, but in terms of how I interact with them, there is very strong consistency.
Well, it depends. Some tools I want to be OS-consistent and unobtrusive. I don't care for the newish trend of everything having its own 'dark mode' (none of which match each other) or the way this is offered as some great innovation when it's only about few pages of code to implement. I would much prefer to have better theming options at the system/WM level.
On the other hand, I have many specialized tools where the UI is superior that of the OS and if anything I would like everything else to look more like those. Ableton Live was an early pioneer of the kind of flat minimalism that people associate most often with Material Design, for example. At the time it was launched most music software manufacturers were still obsessed with skeuomorphism, albeit for entirely justifiable reasons because musicians often fetishize and want to emulate the sound of particular pieces of studio equipment.
> This is an upside for the developer only.
Strongly disagree. How is a consistent user experience enabling developers to support more platforms at a higher level of quality going to lead to worse end-user experience?
To me: it's not, this is just anti-browser sentiment dressing itself up as enlightenment