I wrote recently, about macOS, “it’s hard when the operating system cedes its responsibilities to provide good design patterns,” and Mac developer Brent Simmons in a recent essay shares a parallel line of thinking about how unreliable and untenable designing with the basic macOS UI components has become:

But there’s another reason: the stock Mac UI is designed by Apple, the best designers in the world, and do you really think you can do better? Really?

The app world is full of people who think they’re better and they’re really, really, really not.

Well, I still think Apple has the best collection of UI designers in the world, but, for whatever reasons, the guidance from above on how the Mac UI should look is missing the mark. I’m not blaming the people doing the work — they’re doing great work with the direction they’re given.

So this — bad direction — is where the secret third reason falls down. And we’re left with no real reason to stick with stock Mac UI (except for wanting approval from longtime Mac people like me, and you really shouldn’t care about that at all).

In addition to low interface quality and sometimes flimsy guidance, Simmons also adds how much effort it is just to keep up with default macOS interface, which feels like the opposite of its social contract:

The idea was that by using stock Mac UI you the developer would be carried along — you’d get most of the macOS changes every year mostly for free or with not that much work, since you’d kept up every year.

But my app NetNewsWire has a very stock Mac UI, and Liquid Glass adoption last year was a lot of work. Using stock Mac UI didn’t save us much — in fact, we had more work to do compared to the apps with more custom UI.

We talked about this before in the context of all those menu icons that were mandatory… for just one version. Imagine sinking time and resources to create the icons one year, only to learn 12 months later that this was just a head fake, and one without – as far as I know – even a hint of an apology from Apple.