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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

> I can use the same UI components that I use for making websites and easily share code between all platforms.

I propose that using web components for desktop/mobile applications is not a good thing.

>I propose that using web components for desktop/mobile applications is not a good thing.

Agree, every platform has it's distinctive look & feel and as a user I expect that my apps follow this for 100%. Recently I checked out Flutter, with the 1.0 release i thought it's worth to play around with it. The first thing i did, was installing their demo app on my iPhone they showed on the release event. Within seconds I noticed that there was something wrong. They tried hard to reimplement the bounce effect during scrolling on iOS, but it just didn't feel 100% right.

I totally understand, that not every user out there has this sharp eye for things like that and that there is definitely a business value going cross platform, but this is not something I would be proud as a developer. It's the cheap root for the developer ending up in a cheap experience for their users. Share your business logic between platforms if appropriate, theme it for your CI if needed, but do the UI as expected.

I disagree. I think cumulative hours across the average spectrum of users, they spend far more time on the web / in a web browser / in web tech-based apps than they ever spend (or at least notice they spend) in a "native" app. The web platform has won. It is native toolkits that have to follow web conventions now (hyperlinks, routing, deep linking, system back buttons, etc), and there are users starting to complain when they don't. The platform distinctions are starting to be meaningless to users so long as basic "web" usability is met. (I've met people that switch between Android and iOS regularly based upon whatever was a cheaper device or had a better plan with their carrier. Those sorts of people absolutely don't care about "native" widgets and see the differences in platforms as a silly barrier to the web.)

(Arguably that's a problem with Flutter too because it isn't "native" nor "web", it doesn't entirely meet the expectations of web users currently either.)

For better and worse, the web is a ubiquitous platform, and I think getting to be just about the only platform that matters today, regardless of the remaining fan wars between the "native" platforms.

While they are arguably old, these two quick sources I found seem to indicate quite the opposite:

https://amp.businessinsider.com/time-spent-mobile-browsing-v...

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2014/apr/02/...

Even though they are old, the trend at the time was clear: people are spending more time in apps (most of which are probably native) than on the web. The idea that the web is universal and what most people spend their time on isn’t a fact you have established.

Web technologies are loved by developers for their speed and ubiquity. But as a user, I strongly prefer the feel of mobile apps for my day to day interactions. I find the web, particularly on mobile, to be a mess. The interaction models are all unique and confusing and typically not well implemented, while native UI widgets work well and are understood.

But your mobile device is also only one device you interact with in a day. Very few people have the same OS across all their devices, even if you allow for the "close cousins" scenarios like people that only use iOS and macOS. Everyone uses the web everywhere, though, it's the one thing guaranteed to tie all of a user's devices/accounts/actions/"digital life" together today.

I don't have numbers to back it up, I have a lot of anecdotal evidence I've seen, but it does look like there seem to be at least as many people that don't care what widgets an app uses, so long as the app works, as there are people such as yourself that even notice native UI widgets and care about them (deeply and vocally, as often the case may be).

Perhaps, but I surmise that most people spend a large amount of their personal time and life on their mobile devices while people who are using full computers are generally doing so for work. I have seen it personally in my work that native mobile app usage has surpassed both desktop and mobile web usage.

> I propose that using web components for desktop/mobile applications is not a good thing.

It may not be, but it can be the difference between a developer releasing something that has real value to end users versus not releasing anything at all.

One could say that building an Electron app is an example of doing things that don't scale.

As a solo developer using Electron means that I don't have to reimplement all the UI components I already have, and I can publish a decent cross-platform app, where instead of spending time reimplementing everything across platforms I can spend time optimizing it.

I know of no other framework that gives me this power.

We use websites with different UIs every day, can you imagine if we were also complaining that Facebook doesn't feel "native"?

The fact that the component is made up of html, css and javascript instead of layout code, styling code and logic code seems irrelevant.

The difference boils down to feel and behavior. You can style web controls to look very close or identical to native controls, but they’re always going to feel “off” with issues like increased latency, wrong animation curves, and lack of support for system features (such as spring loaded dragging and drag and drop on macOS).

Why?

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