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Comment by kitotik | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, extremely disappointed in this.

I’ve been a heavy Trello advocate since it launched, but the lack of real native clients puts a pretty low ceiling on it’s usefulness at scale.

Atlassian has plenty of native developers on their team, not sure why they would take this route...

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A true native client would be a lot of work. Maintain feature parity without adding new features. Identical UI including all the quirks. Is having a native app going to gain them any users? Maybe for user who can't have a browser installed, but they might not be able to have an internet connection either...

I get that, and I understand why they used Electron. But given Electron in this instance is basically a browser for Trello for all intents and purposes I don't see the point of it.

I'm slowly shifting from your opinion to a general distrust of user configured browsers for providing a UI to "sensitive"(authed, billing) APIs.

"A true native client would be a lot of work."

Electron has given a lot of devs that cop-out. I would rather Electron didn't exist... you'd have fewer desktop apps yes, but the fewer that are out there would be higher quality, and there'd be more work for people that don't buy into this web-must-be-everywhere mentality.

I think choosing a hybrid approach is the way to go here.

The implementation with Electron, as most cases, sucks.

I work with a startup and they have a hybrid app, which binary is 3.5 megabytes [1]. UI is JS/HTML/CSS and is almost the same bundle as the web version [2]

Trello's app is 66MB [3]

1: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ninox-database/id901110441?m...

2: https://app.ninoxdb.de

3: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/trello/id1278508951?mt=12

How does the "hybrid approach" differ from Electron and why is it so much smaller? Don't they still need to embed a full browser engine if the UI is all JS and HTML?

macOS offers WKWebView [1], which essentially uses internal webkit ( safari ) for running the application.

And since all libraries are already on your OS, the build is really small, as well as the memory footprint.

1: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/wkwebview

Slack used to use WebKit but they migrated to Electron for various reasons explained in their blog post https://slack.engineering/building-hybrid-applications-with-...

You have no Linux or Windows support though, right?

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