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Comment by filleduchaos | Hacker News Reader

Christ, Electron would be truly terrible for mobile apps.

All the excuses people have for its bloat ("we all have tons of RAM anyway!", "storage space is cheap!", etc) evaporate when you're running on an ARM processor with maybe 2GB of RAM and 32 to 64GB of onboard storage.

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Well, those excuses are garbage everywhere. :/ All the extra electricity burned around the world would easily pay for more highly skilled devs to write a native application (source: plucked from thin air ;) ).

I'll admit making desktop applications in electron seems just as crazy to me as it does many others, but.. after using Vscode I've questioned that there must be something to it.

Vscode has pretty great performance and is a serious pleasure to use with the right customizations. Should some of that success be credited to electron? (I'm just asking, not implying)

I've been using it a bit at work.. The thing that stops me fully adopting it is how long it takes to start, and then it's very laggy for the first few seconds after that. It is a very nice editor once it's running though for sure!

VSCode's success is due to the team that builds it using Electron as a tool, not as a crutch.

> 32 to 64GB of onboard storage.

If only. Probably a lot closer to 4-16GB for a lot of Android phones.

That hopefully motivates at least some developers not to ship 500mb apps.

Thankfully even the shitty low-end phones I see these days have 8GB ROM

Of which 7GB is taken up by the OS and system apps.

I was kinda exaggerating, then I checked my phone and there's actually 15GB used by the OS.

For a brand new phone. If everyone around you is using a phone that's less than 2 years old and purchased brand new, then you're living in a bubble.

Same issue with web apps that run just great on the developer's 9 month old iMac over a symmetrical 100/100 connection vs the typical family's 5 year old chromebook (or the 8 year old Dell at the office) and 10/768 that's also supporting a Netflix stream.

Electron for mobile is called Cordova and has been around for a long time.

Capacitor is the new Cordova. Check it out.

What's the advantage of Capacitor over Cordova?

Cordova is not Electron for mobile. Calling it that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how both work.

One depends on the OS to provide its built-in Webview/UIWebview. The other packages an entire damn browser with each app.

>browser with each app.

browser and web server?

Requires special modules, you can't just take random npm module e.g. sequelize. Deal breaker for me.

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