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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

Electron apps aren't made because the end result is superior but because of budgets and schedules.

Not even a company like Slack wants to get into the headache of maintaining a couple of native desktop apps, even if they probably have the money to do so.

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I've never really understood this way of thinking. In my experience, it is trivial to maintain cross-platform applications if you encourage code-reuse in the logic layer and tailor the UI/UX experiences for the platform you are targeting. In practice this usually means writing the client business logic in a high-performant language that can target multiple platforms (I've only used Rust for this, but there are other languages out there that would work well with this approach as well), and using FFI when interacting with the UI layer. Combine this with good message passing practices (to homogenise serialisation/deserialisation and avoid the complexity of having hundreds of different FFI functions with various parameters) and you've got something that is easily integrated in platforms with little headache.

I've seen great success with this approach for most platforms including mobile as it provides the end-user with a great user experience (you can use all the native UI APIs which provides an experience that the user is already familiar with) as well as extremely high performance with a high degree of code reuse.

But why bother even setting up different build environments for the different platforms?

Even that part makes it already more work than Electron and I can't think of any meaningful business benefit to not using Electron.

How do you measure "meaningful business impact".

Because everyone optimized for "meaningful business impact" I have no space on my SSD to install your app.

(and even if I install it, it would cause my laptop fans go wild and I go for an alternative / use your app less.)

> In my experience, it is trivial to maintain cross-platform applications

Even if setting up the code reuse among platforms was trivial, now you have to develop and maintain a new UI project for each platform with different languages, SDKs, dev environments, and other peculiarities.

With a web UI you can target 6 platforms at once with the same UI project: Android, iOS, ChromeOS, macOS, Windows, and web.

Slack is API calls. I have a hard time believing a few thin client interfaces - win, darwin, ios, android, gtk, qt - would be that hard with a company size of slack.

The question is not whether they are hard, but whether they are harder and whether that harder is worth it. Has Slack lost a single paying customer of this? I doubt it.

> Electron apps aren't made because the end result is superior but because of budgets and schedules.

I'd add one thing, it's also used because it leverages existing web development skills.

I've made a couple of Electron applications because it simply lets me make a "desktop" app that is basically a web app that can use some local resources such as the file system, notifications, etc. Is it the best way to make a desktop app? Nope. Do I like the fact that Electron, when not optimized, is a pig? Nope.

But me choosing between Electron and a more native platform it is literally the difference between me shipping something or nothing at all.

But that's a budget problem in the end, no?

You might be able to make the point that it's both a budget and a schedule problem, but that involves some reading between the lines. Different people are going to interpret "budget" and "schedule" differently.

Also, every situation is different, as some individuals/organizations have the existing skills to do a native app without learning/retooling and assume the situation is the same everywhere else.

It seems pretty obvious to me that hiring someone that has the skills to do native desktop dev is basically a budget and schedule problem.

> Not even a company like Slack wants to get into the headache of maintaining a couple of native desktop apps

Nope, it is because some bullshit MBA can't see beyond quarterly profits.

Companies like slack are externalizing costs to the customer. Instead of them spending money on developing a proper app, they let the customer provide them a runtime for their prototype which needs 1gigabytes and gigahertz for a chat app! What a waste. While this seems ok in the individual case - obviously people are buying it, it’s madness globally.

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