And what about online tutorials, marketing, user manuals, customer support? You probably want your app to look consistent with that too, right? Do you really expect or even want to sift through multiple different versions of tutorials and guides?
As long as an app is easy to use, people prefer a single look. No one cares about "looking like the OS", except maybe 0.1% of users.
> As long as an app is easy to use, people prefer a single look
No, people are used to an UI language, which in the case of iOS is quite consistent across applications. You expect certain things to work (e.g. flicking in from the left edge means "go back"). There are platform-specific patterns and I'd rather have the app behave accordingly rather than being consistent with other OS' version. The real 0.1% here are probably the users of your app with active devices in both Android and iOS!
This just isn't supported by data. Breaking users into two categories: users who develop a universal mental model of software, and users who develop application specific mental models. The latter group is the overwhelming majority. People don't learn iOS, they learn Spotify.
Designing with this in mind annoys the hell out of people in the former group, no doubt. Those people are likely love customizable software so they can make it the same everywhere. It's super common in Linux setups.
Most people only have one mobile device, a smartphone. Those that have more than one usually still have those with matched OSes. No-one cares about "looking like the OS", but people do care about looking (and, more importantly, behaving) like all the other apps they use.
And as far as manuals and customer support, what you're saying is that you can't afford to do cross-platform properly, and so you're cutting corners. Which is fine if it's stated explicitly upfront, and having an app that behaves weirdly (for a given platform) is better than no app, but please don't insult your users' intelligence by presenting that as some kind of feature.
> And as far as manuals and customer support, what you're saying is that you can't afford to do cross-platform properly
No. What I'm saying is, when people search "Blender lighting tutorial" or "Capcut editing tutorial" on youtube, they want to watch the most popular tutorial and they want it to behave exactly like their phone. If there are any differences whatsoever, like an OS specific swipe back gesture, they're going to leave negative reviews that their app is not working.
You want a good unified app experience, with as minimal deviation as possible only where necessary.
If the app is Blender, or some other extremely complex software then sure. If it’s the bank app or social media, it would take me no time to understand the difference between the iOS and Android native UI.
