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Comment by natch | Hacker News Reader

The lesson here is write native apps using the preferred native tools of the platform, and avoid shortcut solutions.

I think this is a really elitist and unsympathetic statement. It completely ignores the fact that there are people out there whose only realistic option if they want to release on multiple platforms is to use something like electron. You can preach native all day long but the reality is that some people simply do not have the time (i.e. money) to learn, build and maintain three completely different systems and architectures and at the same time and also build a product. Are you saying that these people should simply give up because you consider it a "shortcut solution"?

Yes electron comes with some overhead. But what you get from paying that price are products that otherwise likely wouldn't exist. Some of these are bad indeed, but some of them are also really good and provide real value.

Thanks for sharing this perspective. Some of us have a core competency in a domain outside of CS and want to build niche tools to serve our industry. Electron helps us reach our userbase without excluding one or more platforms. Bloat is secondary compared to the other heavyweight software I have to use.

> I think this is a really elitist and unsympathetic statement

I think that describes the attitude of electron developers toward their users, you're putting your time and convenience over them.

Sad to see how putting effort to learn is considered "elitist".

perhaps, but you can still build a "native" iOS app using flutter without any issue. I think given that even Skype and Visual Studio are build on electron II don't think is all about shortcuts. Having more options is always healthy for developing apps and for the apple store. Of course if you build with pure native code (swift) you won't have the same issues :)

The lesson here is apple will screw up their ecosystem enough that developers will start to leave. Was looking at building pretty involved app and evaluated SwiftUI vs Electron with React. The effort on SwiftUI side about 10x vs Electron/React Apple needs to invest in their tools.

This is what native apps are now on the Mac: https://twitter.com/gruber/status/1140768216853164032 https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1182672138291032068

Those aren't native apps.

"Now it’s incredibly simple to start building a native Mac app from your current iPad app."

— https://developer.apple.com/mac-catalyst/

Literally every paragraph of copy on this page emphasizes them as native apps.

Regardless of what Apple calls them, they don't behave like a native Mac app, and I (and many other Mac users) will refuse to call them as such until they do better.

"Electron is a framework for creating native applications with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS."[1]

[1] http://electronjs.org

Touché.

That is a luxury that very few companies can afford, specially on the desktop where macOS is not the predominant platform.

> and avoid shortcut solutions

and then the app is never written

This is true for many apps, especially for non-profit apps.

Pretty much. Back when apps were native to the platform they would be windows only. It is insane to require every app developer to have to put in 3x the work to rebuild the app for every single platform using its native tools. I would rather have one app that is 3x better and works everywhere. We just need to solve the massive memory issues with electron.

The memory issues isn’t Electron’s fault; It’s Chromium’s

the overwhelming amount of apps that are native beg to differ

> the overwhelming amount of apps that are native beg to differ

the overwhelming number of indie apps that are cross platform? Let me just go ahead and try to use inkscape and gimp on my mac.

Yeah, when you're coding for a cpu, write in assembly only. Write a separate copy of your app for iphone and macOS because one of those is arm and one isn't.

Don't use anything that provides portability like C or Objective-C, that's not really "native" to the CPU architecture.

.. I know that sounds silly, but you're advocating for that one layer up. It's a very good analogy I think.

People use electron in order to "compile to" native apps for linux and windows and mac without having to write the app 3 times.

Compilers can often outperform handwritten assembly.

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