I'm going down this route and making dev tools that help replace the sucky entrenched big players. I haven't officially launched a proper version (early access is going on now) but I'm hoping that I'll be able to be as successful as you are.
It's been a bit over a decade.
Some people might be put off by how competitive those spaces are. Don't be!
https://blog.nugget.one/2016/10/04/competition-does-not-matt...
The traditional "sell once, offer paid upgrades" seems to be better suited for apps with a stable feature set, where you can take a year or two to produce the next major version. However, a more iterative approach to development doesn't work with this model very well.
The recently popular switch to subscriptions (Adobe, Office, 1Password, Jetbrains, YNAB, etc), while obviously every developer's wet dream, may not sit very well with customers, at least if there's no obvious service being offered (like e.g. Dropbox).
May I ask a few questions?
- What category is your app in?
- What is an "electron app"
- How do you distribute? Mac App Store/Windows/Your own site?
Thanks!
That's one of the annoying (and liberating) things about desktops, they don't have an app-store, so you have to run your own store (without reviews) and people have to trust that you're not going to sell them a virus.
Why electron over native?
How large in scope is your program?
How large in scope was your program when you first started?
Is it just one program and domain or have you diversified to different areas?
Presumably to go cross-platform with less effort.
And there is huge value in supporting both. If somebody wants to buy an organization-wide license, they almost certainly have lots of both and if you're being evaluated against a competitor that only supports one platform it is quite the leg up.
Don't do that... there are quite a lot of cross-platform but native ways to develop fast & slick desktop apps.
> For others, if I see some desktop app made with electron, I just skip it
The Slack desktop app isn't bad, though I'm not sure if you've tried it.
> The only reason it exist is that web devs do not want to learn right tools for the right job.
I disagree. It allows people to get up and running with a cross platform app relatively quick. You could then port most of that to a mobile app since a lot of the platforms (if not all of the major ones) allow one to create an app using HTML and javascript. I'm a desktop developer (the only web stuff I've done is working on a Wordpress page) but I still see value in Electron and plan to use it for a project. You get cross platform plus all of the libraries that nodejs has, which is a ton.
Qt, wxWidgets, Gtk,...
> The Slack desktop app isn't bad, though I'm not sure if you've tried it.
I have to use it for the job. And yes, I think it is bloatware, memory hog with a non-intuitive UI.
The bigger issue is obviously lazy developers not polishing their electron app, but you can do basically anything with it.