I understand why scrappy startups like Electron, but it's astounding that companies as large Spotify and Slack won't shell out for a couple of Windows/MacOS native developers.
God how I hate Electron apps (nothing against Electron itself though)... People don't appreciate how much it means for example, for Mac users not seeing the rubber band effect on scrollers, let alone everything else feeling just unnatural and sloppy. You are immediately transferred back to the 1990s. Why should I care that some big fat corporation wants to save pennies on native app developers?
I can forgive a free and open app running on Electron (hello, Signal), but never a commercial one, full stop.
That's only after a tremendous amount of effort, with high CPU and mem utilization to add to it. The potential with native (at least on Mac) would be much higher.
Please define "fine"? There is always a very detectable lag when switching between channels and/or DMs. Always. Not a single exception.
There's zero technical and human reason for allowing that to continue. The visible-on-the-screen messages are cached and you can, you know, just get on with it by painting the whole thing on the screen right away.
It's "fine", he says. "Fine"...
[grumbles under his nose, annoyed, and ventures into the far distance]
Electron can be done well when treated as any other Desktop UI framework. VSCode is probably one of the only examples of that. I think the bad reputation comes from lazy wrappers pushed out to tick the "Desktop app" box, which are the unfortunate majority in my experience.
Well you kind of debunked your own first point: while we theoretically can have very fast and responsive Electron apps, the fact of life is that we don't; they are a vanishing minority.
What "can" be done is kind of irrelevant. What's much more important is what metrics would the default (or lazy as you called it) way of doing things with framework X or Y net. If the defaults are a slow and laggy app then that's what 95% or more of the using apps will be.
I made no point about the state of most Electron apps. What I mean to say is that rather than pivot to a native toolkit, businesses could prioritize improving their use of Electron. These days most of the UI world is focused on web. Using well-established and widely understood tech brings a lot of benefits.
Not to mention that desktop UI development is just unpleasant. I say this as someone who would really prefer that not to be true, it's just that in my search I've been disappointed. You choose between a number of imperfect "cross-platform" frameworks (and deal with their licensing), or maintain native code for several platforms. Creating custom "widgets" often requires you to start at the drawing API level and have a deep understanding of the framework.
I am keeping an eye on Avalonia, though. The tooling wasn't quite there yet when I tried it.
The part where I get frustrated in a similar manners as yours is that while yes businesses could prioritize improving their use of Electron, they never do.
I'd say they would need at least 30 people each to support windows & mac native apps. Especially considering all the extra overhead having multiple codebases introduces. Maybe more than that.
Edit: Just to clarify "need" is in the context of working in a big company on a complex product. These products are a lot bigger than they appear.
Tangent but the original spotify gui was about 1mb download and blazing fast. In no small part because of the original author of µTorrent (and ScummVM) had a central role. [1]
Spotify the company only moved to a electron remake later, I can only guess because it was hard to find more quality devs.
People might not remember this, but µTorrent used to be amazingly snappy too before it got bought and shovelwared.
