An experiment: should an app have its own personality, or feel fully native?

Comic Vision now has a News tab. It pulls this blog straight into the app, so I can tell you about a new feature and you can read it without leaving the headset. Building it, I went down a small rabbit hole, and I want to hand the result to you before I decide anything.

So the question is, on a device like the Vision Pro, where every app is made of the same frosted glass, do you want an app to keep that neutral system look, or do you want it to have some personality of its own?

Where this came from

During development I took some time to think about the design (not that I'm a designer, so it might all be super bad 😆) mainly for the website and the app's icon. Warm washi paper, sumi ink for text, a single vermillion red borrowed from a Japanese seal stamp for highlights. When I built the News tab that basically connects with the website, it felt strange for it to be dressed in plain grey glass while the site it goes to has this whole identity.

So I tried tinting it. All the while trying to keep the real glass effects. Paper tones and ink text in light mode, a deep ink wash in dark mode, vermillion for highlights.

The tool below shows the two side by side. Flip between the stock glass and the themed version, and try the light/dark switch on the themed side.

That's a flat-screen approximation. In the headset the glass is real: your actual room refracts through it, and the paper tint sits on top of that. But it gets the idea across. And the real thing is in the app itself if you want to see it properly in the headset, or it will be shortly, once this build clears App Review.

The struggle between the two

I personally have conflicting opinions on this so I thought I'd ask what other people think.

Keep it native. visionOS glass is good and it was determined by people that know what they are doing that it was the best possible experience for a spatial OS. It blends an app into your space, and every app being made of the same material makes the whole system feel whole. I also often try to replicate what the big players like Apple are doing so until now it didn't even cross my mind to give my app some colors.

Give it personality. On the other side most apps look a little bit the same, which is sad in my opinion. An entertainment app and a spreadsheet app being made of the exact same material doesn't feel right. The website has a warmth that I tried hard to make work, and pulling that into the app makes the whole thing feel like one product instead of two, and the app icon feel like it belongs instead of pulled out of nowhere. This experiment is about trying to bring that warmth without giving up the native feel.

To make it work, I had to rebuild the tab bar

The tab bar is where the experiment got a bit more complex. It's a system component, and it turned out you can't really customize it at all. Left alone, it would have stayed plain grey glass while everything beside it wore the website's palette, which felt out of place. So to make the theming actually hold together, I had to rebuild the tab bar from scratch.

The goal there was the same, change how it looks without changing how it feels. So I built the rebuilt bar to sit as close to the system one as I could get it. Idle, it's a column of circular icons, look at it for about a second and the ornaments open to show their labels. I spent a lot of time getting that motion and its timing to match what the platform does. There are tiny little details that are not exactly the same, but I think it's close enough that you wouldn't really notice unless you're comparing them side by side. And now, it can carry the app's colors, vermillion for the selected tab, ink and paper for the rest, while still feeling like the native tab bar.

So, what is your opinion?

Right now this is just an experiment, the goal isn't to redesign the whole app. I have other features I'm working on and this was just a little side quest while implementing the news tab. For the moment it's only this one tab, and if people like it enough I might move on to giving a bit of color to the rest of the app after the big features are done.

• Do you like apps that carry their own identity, or do you prefer everything to feel uniformly native on visionOS?
• Does the themed version feel warm, or does it feel like it's fighting the platform?
• I made a light and dark theme, I feel like the dark theme is closer to Apple's gray glass but bringing a bit of life to it. While the light theme is a bit of a bigger contrast, but I like that it's feeling way different than what you usually see. Do you have a preference? Would you keep the toggle between light and dark?

Either way, it stays an experiment for now. I'm heads-down on the features already in flight, so nothing here is changing soon. I'm just curious what people think.