Designing for Android and iOS without building two different brands

Users notice when an app ignores their platform’s habits. They also notice when your brand disappears. The skill is knowing which to honour where.

Keep consistent

• Brand colours, typography choices and tone of voice
• Core flows and information architecture
• Iconography style and illustration
• Feature naming

Follow the platform

• Navigation patterns: back behaviour, tab bars and system gestures
• Dialogs, pickers, sheets and system controls
• Typography scaling and safe areas
• Haptics, motion and permission prompts

Build a token-based design system

Define colours, spacing and type as tokens, then map them to Material 3 on Android and to iOS styles. Components share structure while adapting their details.

Test on real devices

Always review designs on actual phones, with large text and dark mode enabled.

See our mobile app design service.