> Designers need to be careful to not give people rope for them to hang themselves with.

No, they don't. It's my system, and the look should be what I want it to be, period. What designers actually need to do is learn to respect their users, even when they disagree with the user's choices.

Certainly that's a good reason to force a legible version of settings, and the path to settings...

But if the user sets the system to hot dog stand, the apps should be hot dog stand. If the user wants the system text font to be wingdings, they're in for a nasty time, but that doesn't mean an app should force a different font

> and then they engage with the app less or even churn

I wasn't aware engagement maximisation is the reason we don't get customization options anymore, but it makes perfect sense.

No one used to care about this because it was at the discretion of the user whether they want to keep using the app or not. Whereas today, it's the company objective to keep the user in the app as much as possible.

and then they engage with the app less or even churn.

If your content is so poor that a change of colors can make people leave, then perhaps your content is not worth having.

> Designers need to be careful to not give people rope for them to hang themselves with.

See Win 95 resolution change workflow.

This was 20 years ago. A lot of knowledge was lost since then.

That’s clearly bullshit because if the user sets a system wide theme and your appLICATION follows that theme, then your appLICATION is not going to be any harder to use than the system itself nor any other appLICATION using native widgets.

What is actually happening is designers are forcing non-native controls, in part because web technologies have infested every corner of software development these days. Unsurprisingly, those non-native widgets break in a plethora of ways when the system diverges even marginally from the OS defaults.

And instead of those designers admitting that they fucked up, they instead double down on their contempt for their users.

Also, can we please not call desktop applications “apps” in response to an article about an OS that predates smartphones by several decades.

People who are more likely to customize their app are more likely power users, therefore they're going to engage with the app more anyways.

Why would someone changing app colors to ones they specifically chose make them use the app less? There is no logic in that statement.

I don’t “engage” with products that infantilise me and won’t give me the rope to hang myself with, I endure them, and only to the extent I have to.