> lose styling consistency
Yes. And that is (almost always¹) a good thing.
Only the designers of an app, product-owners etc. want their app to "look consistent over platforms".
Your users want the file-dialog, window-chrome, menus etc consistent too. But for them consistent means consistent with the 20+ other applications they use on a daily base. So native.
¹ Obviously some software excepted. E.g. categories like "expert software" like Blender, AutoCAD, Photoshop/CS, where dialogs must a) be optimized for their niche workflow and b) remain consistent for that user when they upgrade their OS or move between OSes. But that's an exception. Your TODO-list app or PDF reader almost certainly is not that.
Emacs, which still uses CUI-incompatible keybindings and even key names from a keyboard that hasn't been made since the 01980s.
Videogames.
Excel still supports MS-DOS Lotus 1-2-3 "/" commands, although it certainly doesn't look like Lotus for MS-DOS.
Basically any software people care about is an exception to your rule.
> E.g. categories like "expert software"
As pointed out.
Actually users think functionality is 1000x more important than what it looks like. Since making things look nice takes away dev time from functionality, what it looks like doesn't matter much (above some minimum expectation of course).
Not entirely.
I care a lot if an app on my android suddenly opens an IOS date picker.
Because I don't care about date pickers. I don't care about how it looks. All I care about is picking a date and doing that fast.
But now I have to learn a -to me- unfamiliar interface, spend cognitive load on something unrelated to what I was trying to do (e.g. schedule a date with a friend)
> But for them consistent means consistent with the 20+ other applications they use on a daily base. So native.
This was probably true 20 years ago but is not true today.
The majority of apps your average (non-HN) user uses is actually on their phone and not using the native UI widgets.
On their desktop they’re using apps like Spotify, Slack, and Microsoft Office or Google Docs.
The average user of today is not using a lot of native apps.
I still want native apps (including proper OS Integration) even though I don't get them.
Indeed.
Users don't want the slack they get. They'd much rather have a slack client that integrates in their OS.
The main reason I get this Slack client that's the same across OSX, Ubuntu and Windows, is because the company doesn't want to spend time building three native apps. And that's understandable and perfectly fine.
But if it cost slack more time and effort to build a single app that runs on four platforms than it would cost them to build 4 that integrate into the platform, we'd get a native client within weeks.
> On their desktop they’re using apps like Spotify, Slack, and Microsoft Office or Google Docs
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t hate these apps.
> Your users want the file-dialog, window-chrome, menus etc consistent too. But for them consistent means consistent with the 20+ other applications they use on a daily base. So native.
I don't think what you posit is true at all, at least not in 2025. Windows itself has abandoned consistency between its native applications, with more custom and modern styling that looks nothing like what you get out of the box with Windows UI frameworks. Almost every piece of software currently running on my computer has custom chrome: the web browser, my VPN, VSCode, Discord, Steam, mouse driver, keyboard driver, laptop fan driver. The only one that doesn't is qbittorent, and it looks like a complete eyesore. It is quite literally the odd one out, so much for "consistent with 20+ other applications".
Maybe it's different in MacOS land, but from my perspective you're 20 years behind if your application is trying to blend in with the OS in any regard other than the corner in which the X button is located. That way of thinking went out of fashion decades ago, and good riddance to it because things look much better now. What I mentioned above is a pretty good representative sample of my daily use, and the more I think about other software I occasionally use, the more I am grateful that nobody else still thinks like this. LiveSplit and Asesprite come to mind as two applications that strongly benefit from having bespoke chrome and wouldn't be nearly as nice to use if they looked anything like a native Windows application. Of course, my own software uses custom chrome as well, because looking nice makes it more pleasant to use, wouldn't you know it.
What you describe is an old and common problem with Microsoft Windows. Hell, even Windows applications built by microsoft itself, even within the same team, are inconsistent often.
This is a problem. One that end-users may not recognize, but the cognitive load and learning curve this brings is real and costly.
It is one of the many reasons people like Mac. It's also one of the reasons people feel awkward on e.g. Ubuntu (or just linux). Because eventhough GTK is highly consistent, the apps that don't follow this consistency (Libre office, Gimp, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc) are more common than the ones that do.
> Maybe it's different in MacOS land
It is. Windows has always had consistency issues; macOS hasn't.
macOS doesn't have (many) consistency issues in the OS itself or first-party apps. But when it comes to the third-party apps people use? Totally inconsistent. Most of them are either webapps accessed through the browser (Google Docs), webapps accessed through Electron shells (Discord, Slack, Zoom, 1Password), or non-webapps that nevertheless have their own bespoke UI (Adobe, Microsoft Office, browsers themselves other than Safari). I'm not a fan of the situation, but that's the way it is.
I do fully admit these consistency issues were less bad in the past.