> i understand that even with modern cross-platform UI toolkits, like qt and wx, multi-platform development is more labor intensive than an electron app.
I don’t think this is a given, it only really becomes true if you have a need to control the UI down to the pixel, and if we’re being honest, very few developers actually need that. Your life as a cross platform dev becomes a lot easier when you accept that the UI will have minor platform-influenced deviations that ultimately have zero negative impact on usability.
That’s one of the reasons Sublime is been able to keep their boat floating — it doesn’t look and feel 100% the same between platforms and even adopts various platform-isms, like the text navigation key shortcuts under macOS.
The only reason “native-ish” cross platform UI frameworks are challenging to use is brand-driven UI design. Do as Google is suggesting they’re going to do and let brand take a back seat and things become a lot more simple.