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.

Here's the question, up front: 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

The website has a look. Warm washi paper, sumi ink for text, a single vermillion red borrowed from a Japanese seal stamp. When I built the News tab, dropping the blog into the app, it felt strange for it to be dressed in plain grey glass while the site it mirrors has this whole identity.

So I tried tinting it. I kept the real glass (the translucency, the way the room shows through, the soft highlights on the edges), and layered the website's colors on top. Paper tones and ink text in light mode, a deep ink wash in dark mode, vermillion for anything selected.

The tool below is 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 case for each side

I keep going back and forth, which is exactly why I'm asking.

Keep it native. visionOS glass is genuinely good. It blends an app into your space, and there's real comfort in consistency: every app being made of the same calm material makes the whole system feel of a piece. There's a fair argument that a comic reader should get out of the way and let the art be the only thing with a personality.

Give it personality. The flip side is that every app looking identical is a little sterile. A bookshelf app and a spreadsheet app being made of the exact same material feels like a missed opportunity. The website has a warmth to it that I like, and pulling that into the app makes the whole thing feel like one product instead of two. The bet of this experiment is that you can add that warmth without giving up the native feel: keep the real glass, keep every behavior identical, and only change the color.

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

The tab bar, that vertical strip of icons on the left, is where the experiment got real. It's a system component, and it turned out you can't tint it at all: no background, no color, nothing. Left alone, it would have stayed plain grey glass while everything beside it wore the website's palette, which defeats the whole point. So to make the theming actually hold together, I had to rebuild the tab bar from scratch.

The goal there was the same bet as everywhere else: 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 and the icons bloom open to show their labels, and I spent a lot of time getting that motion and its timing to match what the platform does. The payoff is that it can now carry the website's colors, vermillion for the selected tab, ink and paper for the rest, without feeling like a custom control you have to think about.

So: what do you think?

First, to set expectations: this is just an experiment, not the plan. I'm not about to re-theme the whole app, and there's no timeline for anything like that. It's one tab, behind a flag, and I mostly wanted to try the idea and hear what you think before deciding whether it goes any further at all.

• 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?
• Do you have a preference between the light and dark versions, or would you rather keep the toggle and choose for yourself?

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.