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Comment by felixrieseberg | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that that's entirely fair. I for instance don't dislike Cordova for some philosophical reason, but because I have so far hated every single iOS/Android Cordova app - mostly for performance and polish reasons.

I do enjoy Visual Studio Code, Atom, Slack, and other apps built with Electron. Yes, people also use it to build horrible apps, but Electron has proven that it's capable of powering apps people love. I have yet to see a Cordova app people love.

TL;DR: I love various Electron apps. If I see an amazing Cordova app, I will reconsider my position towards Cordova.

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Do you think this a bad app given it is one guy trying to target both iOS and Android, and both phone and tablets form factors? http://bland.com

This was already a ton of work. I shudder at the thought of having to have done this with 2 seperate native versions instead. I would have never shipped.

That link sends me to a page that says "Click here to buy Bland.com for your website name!".

How embarrassing... http://blanqd.com

Cool. You might also want to update the link in your profile :)

Ugh. Autocorrect strikes again!

Cordova apps performance is the main reason I dislike it. It's wonderful in principle, but when every Cordova app I try seems to have issues like delay and malformed UI components, I find it difficult to appreciate.

Electron has been the basis for several great applications though, just looking at their website[0] you can see a good number of apps that look and run great. Discord[1] and Gitkraken[2] among them, for starters.

[0]: http://electron.atom.io/

[1]: https://discordapp.com/

[2]: https://www.gitkraken.com/

I wonder if it is a sample size issue here: the number of Electron apps in the wild is currently fewer and the number of well written apps for seems like something of a statistical anomaly. Meanwhile there seem to be a larger overall number of apps written with Cordova/PhoneGap and the ones everyone notices are the ones that are poorly written. I'd wager that the Cordova apps that are well written are mostly invisible, even given how well most people think they recognize "native" widgets in mobile, the gap between HTML5 performance and native performance I think is narrower than a lot of people give it credit.

> given how well most poeple think they recognize "native" widgets in mobile

Every time I've opened a Cordova app I haven't known it was done in Cordova, but immediately thought the app was acting very oddly. Checked the source and yeah, there it is. Cordova.

That's not to say that every Cordova app is bad, I'm sure there some that work well, and if I had a need for any of the example apps in their showcase[0] I would have already tested some. HTML5 performance isn't so much the issue as the implementation of the wrapper. Electron stands as a testimonial to the capability of web technologies as an application platform, it's the history of Cordova applications, even in the last month I have tested an up to date Cordova app, and it just doesn't hold up to the hype. And I'm someone who really wants cross-platform web-based development on mobiles to be great.

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