> Revery is the same - aside from platform-specific behavior, if your app looks or behaves differently on another platform, that's a bug! I want my applications to feel like they belong to the platform and not identical on every platform
Of course that's a choice for everyone to make, but I feel like in general the benefit of fitting in the platform is overrated. After all the whole webapp-everything somewhat shows that people don't care that much, they are happy to use GMail for example. Another family of examples would be the big software packages like the Adobe or Autodesk stuff, they tend to have a fairly custom look&feel. IMO it's probably suffi…
I disagree; the benefit isn't overrated, it's underrated because it's not realized, thanks to most apps doing their best to _not_ fit in the platform. What full platform fit enables is consistent UX and interoperability. Lack of the latter places an actual cap of what users can do (except for the small percent that can force an app to interoperate, whether it likes it or not).
In my not so humble opinion, the current UX trends are based on circular reasoning - users don't demand functionality, interoperability and ergonomic design because those are rarely given to them, so they don't know they could have it. And since they're not demanding, this is used as a justification to not give it.
> After all the whole webapp-everything somewhat shows that people don't care that much, they are happy to use GMail for example.
It doesn't show that. It's just that people don't have much choice anyway. Crappy and bloated GMail UI vs. Thunderbird that requires a little bit of knowledge to set up. That's the choice.
Most software, including webpages, isn't substitute goods. Fastmail isn't a substitute to GMail once you have an account. LibreOffice isn't a substitute for Google Docs, not once someone shares a document with you through Google's cloud. Network effects are powerful, and they reinforce the basic way normal people treat software - as magic, "gift from gods", something that works the way it works because that's how it works.
I'm just pointing this out, because I hate the constant use of "the market decided" and "users voted with their wallets/eyeballs" as justification for bad engineering. It's mostly circular reasoning.
> Another family of examples would be the big software packages like the Adobe or Autodesk stuff, they tend to have a fairly custom look&feel.
Those are somewhat special cases, because they need so much functionality packed in the UI that they replace platform's conventions with ones better suited to the problem.
(Sometimes it leads to weird stuff, like Photoshop and its dialog boxes, in which buttons change meaning when you hold down CTRL.)