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There are three important factors you need to consider: your focus (as a business), how familiar your users are with your UI, and how different your UI and functionality are on different platforms.

There may be branding reasons to keep a consistent UI across your platforms, perhaps especially for lesser-known brands that are still fighting to establish an identity in the minds of their customers. However, users are typically more familiar with the device-specific UI conventions than those of a brand. Jakob Nielsen often states, “Users spend most of their time on other sites,” and while we’re not just talking about websites here, it is much the same principle (on a smartphone, simply replace “sites” with “apps”).

 

Are most of your users spending hours a day using your service? Have they used it for a long time? Or are the majority of your users infrequent or newly acquired? Let’s say you have a business or productivity service and you know the majority of your users spend lots of time in it all year long. In this case, familiarity across the applications trumps device UI conventions, because the user has invested a significant amount of time learning your unique UI. On the other hand, if users haven’t spend that much time with your services and haven’t built strong cognitive and emotional ties to your designs and features, then device-specific UI conventions will generally result in better usability.

 

This has two aspects: a) Is your service only solving a single problem with a single feature, or is it more advanced? and b) Is there a difference in functionality and features across the various devices? If the features you offer on different platforms vary greatly, then adhere to device UI conventions, since cross-platform consistency will yield little benefit in terms of usability (using the same branding and general aesthetic design won’t help the user if the features are widely different — in fact, they could potentially cause harm as the user will think there’s overlap when in fact there isn’t). On the other hand, if you’re solving a single, simple problem, then diverging from device UI conventions is okay since users will very quickly learn your unique UI and you’ll potentially be able to solve the UI problems specific to your feature more readily than the generic device conventions afford.