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Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

We built our product for the web. People wanted our product as a desktop app. So we wrapped it in Electron and now we have 3 desktop apps. People wanted our product as a mobile app. So we wrapped it in Capacitor and now we have two mobile apps.

There are just two of us building this product.

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What prevents you from using Qt to do almost exactly the same thing?

2 developers. Also, "almost exactly" is a funny oxymoron.

Qt is just as easy for 2 devs are webtech is? (that's a rhetorical question - it is.)

Qt + Webtech is twice as hard, though.

They built their product for the web.

Our platform[1] needs to run on web/mobile, so... Qt would not allow us to do even close to the exact same thing.

[1] To help provide more context: https://supernotes.app/

So efficient for you, but 1000x more resources everywhere it runs.

I wonder if someone can quantify the carbon impact of Electron just from Slack.

> So efficient for you, but 1000x more resources everywhere it runs.

And yet, to the people who do use their app on the desktop, this is obviously a preferable situation to not using the app – which would probably be the case had the developers decided against Electron.

And yet, we have single indie developers writing multiplatform Qt [1] and macOS native [2] Slack apps. Last time I checked, Ripcord used 30-40MiB RAM, a small fraction of the official Slack client.

Writing native apps (or a Qt app) would well be in reach of Slack. In fact, they already have native apps. E.g. Slack for iOS/iPadOS is native [3], just allowing M1 Mac users to use the iPadOS version would most likely be a large net improvement in resource use for those who'd choose to install the iPadOS version. Unfortunately, they disallow iPadOS installs on macOS to force people to use the terrible Electron version.

[1] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

[2] https://shrugs.app

[3] https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/931599784137363459?lang=e...

Exactly this is what I don’t get. Huge corporations are so hard for cross-platform development while Facebook, Google, Microsoft et alia could just spawn as many developer for a new platform as they can. I know that management is trying to cut back on every single penny, but is financing React Native really that much cheaper than just writing that tiny amount of code for each platform that will call into that single native library/web API used everywhere? Especially when you have to have a native dev either way because bugs will happen that will need platform-specific knowledge as well.

Because I can honestly understand going cross-platform by a small startup that can’t finance n*numOfPlatforms devs, but for Slack and the like it makes zero sense to me.

Ripcord/Shrugs don't have mobile apps, don't run on the web, and do not need to maintain a backend.

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