> The "coherence and familiarity" argument for native apps is only half the story though.
The user only uses the application in the platforms that one uses; so cross-platform coherence is mostly meaningless.
> And as an app developer, when you have to make a decision regarding whether you should be familiar and coherent to the rest of the operating system or the other installs of your app, that's pretty much always going to land on the "my app" side.
They might be beneficial to the developer; but it definitely isn’t to the user, which ultimately uses the app.
One might argue that the user will use the app for multiple platforms; However the user will ‘know’ the average user experience for both platforms, hence having no problems adapting two different interfaces if the interface is well designed to match each platform.
> Especially with Microsoft office, which was completely chock full of custom controls and didn't feel at all like part of the OS last time I used a natively installed version (on windows 7)
I’m pretty sure Microsoft has opened the ribbon controls for this exact argument. At the very least, the Windows 7 file explorer’s toolbar looks very similar to the Office 2007; so Microsoft is trying to make the operating system more coherent. The introduction of the Notification Center in Windows 10 has a similar purpose; to make lots of different notification system in Windows coherent.
If you want to look what an operating system looks like when the entire ecosystem considers coherence importantly: try using macOS. macOS users take this very seriously to the point that almost every app (that is not election) uses the default cocoa toolkit.
Microsoft office isn’t an exception; they implemented the custom ribbon menu, but other than that it’s mostly plain Cocoa and it doesn’t standout as much as in other platforms.