Let's stop pretending that "companies" could just do things better at no extra cost.
I prefer a desktop UI on a desktop, but I also prefer paying less for software I use, and halving the UI development costs to enable that is a pretty sensible tradeoff.
They're actually spending a shit-ton of money on designer-hours and developer-hours in order to have everything custom, but still with a subpar experience.
It's similar to accessibility: a huge chunk of free off-the-shelf options are more accessible compared to the non-accessible chimeric design system of most modern web apps and sites.
It looks custom designed because... it's not designed at all :D
At this point I'm not even sure if what you said is an insult or a compliment.
Almost all projects I worked in looked more or less like the following:
- a BA meets with the client and creates unstyled wireframes with all of the requested features. (BA doesn't really think about UX here, more or less applies some generic patterns).
- the development team grabs the wireframes, uses a generic preexisting "design system" which is the cheapest for the chosen technology (can be whatever: Bootstrap, Tailwind, Material Design) and max. adjusts colors a bit to match the client's brand
That's it. There is no design.
Are they though? My impression is that most companies are just using frameworks or sdks that promise some degree of cross platform uniformity, and that’s why they don’t use the native toolkits. The savings come from not having to develop UI for multiple OS targets.
Consider the latest UI disaster - Apple with liquid glass making stuff worse in the most fundamental way - decreasing readability. Doing worse was extra cost, so yeah, in many cases companies can just do things better by not wasting the design money and spending part of it on actual design improvements. No need to bring up the myth of the huge 50% savings when using a single menu everywhere, there is no way it costs that much (neither does having different padding values per platform)!
