Platforms

We try to design apps that feel at home on their respective platform, taking advantage of the unique functionality that exists within each ecosystem. At the same time, we lean on GitHub's design language of colors, iconography, copywriting, and visual design, to provide a coherent cross-platform experience to people.

GitHub

While we do our best to leverage platform technologies on Android and iOS, we also use components, colors, iconography, and other elements from GitHub's design infrastructure to provide understandable and cohesive experiences across all platforms.

Recommended resources:

• Primer Interface Guidelines
• Octicons

Responsive web

The mobile apps complement GitHub's responsive web efforts. The web – and the value of the URL – remain a core part of GitHub's product philosophy. Because of this, we do our best to provide escape hatches from the apps to the mobile website whenever possible. We do this by including Share actions in the navigation bar whenever possible.

Conversely, many experiences can be better when we remove the URL and allow users to take advantage of a more gesture-based, fluid app experience. For example, when triaging notifications, it can often feel faster and easier to swipe notifications done, rather than tapping through them one at a time. Because these experiences can be so powerful, we also provide prompts in the mobile browser to open GitHub's native app.

Android

Our Android application leans on the Material Design Spec to provide usable, understandable, and responsive applications.

Recommended resources:

• Material Design
• Material Components
• About Material Shape
• The Type System
• Material Baseline Figma Kit
• Material Design Dark Theme Figma Kit
• How to Design a Dark Theme Using Material
• Material Sound
• Understanding Motion
• Material Surfaces
• Understanding Layout
• Understanding Navigation
• The Color System

Be sure to explore past Google I/O videos to learn about designing great native Android applications.

iOS and iPadOS

Our iOS and iPadOS applications lean on the Human Interface Guidlines to provide responsive, accessibly, and performant applications.

Recommended resources:

• iOS Human Interface Guidelines
• Design for iPad
• Design with iOS pickers, menus, and actions
• Design for the iPadOS pointer
• Designing for iPhone X
• Designing Audio-Haptic Experiences
• Visual Design and Accessibility
• Designing Fluid Interfaces
• Intentional Design
• Designing with Dark Mode
• Designing Sound

Be sure to explore past WWDC session videos about design to learn more about designing great mobile experiences on iOS and iPadOS.