But I agree, all of these clients suck in their own way. :(
Also, not sure what they do to it (no Electron?), but Telegram feels super fast, really pleasant experience.
Almost any other messaging platform is dominated by Electron clients (bar the few very WIP Matrix clients such as Neochat).
I don't know about the others. Are any of them native?
But yes, of course a phone client does not preclude a desktop client; it's just that being phone-first forces/nudges people to having it on their phone as well, making it more valuable for everyone they know.
The point of the laptop is not checking the messages, but typing them. If you're at home, which is where a lot of us are these days, it's pretty easy to open the laptop and save time on typing.
BTW, not sure why I got downvoted. Maybe it wasn't you, we'll see.
My point was exactly that pressuring people to have the client on their phone makes them check the messages more often, because that makes the service more attractive to other users. That, I think, is the reason most popular service are phone-first, even when typing messages is easier on desktop.
(And no, I didn't downvote.)
I actually think we have a competitive advantage here... developing native desktop apps is costly, and most commercial platforms don't bother these days (most you'll get just use a web client in Electron).
However I believe open-source makes it possible to sustain. You can already use native clients such as (the latest version of) Gajim with a Snikket server, but currently without the guarantee it's been tested and interoperable on every single feature... we'll get to that.
Telegram has a Qt client which is faster and slicker than anything electron-based tho
He's talking about the most used apps in the world, the ones you use to keep in touch with friends and family. Most of their apps are either websites on top of a bundled browser.