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Comment by ghostpepper | Hacker News Reader

Is an electron app really a desktop app? I suppose from the users point of view it could be, but I read the OPs post as asking about native desktop apps, ie. providing a better experience than a webapp.

To answer (my interpretation of) the question, there are still plenty of good native desktop apps for MacOS. I don't have data to back this up but I wonder if Mac users are more willing to pay for native desktop apps than Windows or Linux, which makes it easier for indie devs to support themselves full time writing these niche apps.

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I can't speak for all Electron apps, but Beekeeper Studio is a true desktop app yes.

All the assets (css, html, js) are bundled in the app, nothing loads from the web, it is truly 'local', and works 100% offline. It's possible to change styles based on what OS you're running on, and there's the full suite of native APIs you can call.

To weigh in on who pays for software -- I'll let you know once I've sold more copies of my paid version, my guess is that more MacOS using individuals pay for apps, but more businesses running Windows pay for bulk licenses.

Maybe Peldi from Balsamiq will weigh in here.

I think OP means native app. JS based Electron apps are noticeably less responsive and suck a lot more battery+RAM than native apps, easily a 10x difference.

Eh, there have been quite a lot of good Electron apps lately.

Where do you draw the line exactly?

edit: spelling

Even very well written Electron apps consume a lot more battery and memory and are less responsive than very well written native apps. It's the nature of the technology.

> Where do you draw the line exactly?

UI guidelines from Apple.

That even Apple regularly does not follow. Yeah. Great example... :>

Please, name a _single_ good Electron app besides VSCode. I'll wait.

In most cases the choice is not between an Electron app and an (imaginary) "good" app. The choice is between an Electron app and no app at all.

Sure, I understand that. But that's not what the parent was saying. The parent was saying there have been a number of good Electron apps recently. The only Electron app I ever see anyone hold up as good is VSCode, an app that makes a herculean effort to mitigate the latency and performance problems that Electron apps usually have.

If the choice is between an Electron app and no app at all? I would rather the Electron app not lie to my face that it's a real application. No one expects a website in your browser to follow system conventions perfectly or behave like any other app on your system would. That expectation instantly and reasonably changes the moment it has its own application icon and windows, and Electron apps don't give a shit. I would rather not need to have Teams and Slack both installed and chewing up my CPU and GPU at work just because they both decided they're special enough to try and claim all of my resources.

> VSCode, an app that makes a herculean effort to mitigate the latency and performance problems that Electron apps usually have.

Can you point to the parts of the program (source) that implement such optimizations? I'm curious, in particular, about how other editors solve the performance problems.

Large parts of VSCode is implemented in C++ and running webassembly to avoid the problems with electron. An electron app that doesn't have parts in webassembly can't be as good as VSCode.

Can you point to such files in the VSC repository? The `src` directory doesn't contain any.

Notion, Obsidian, and the like are getting pretty popular and are all Electron based. Postman was good after the Chrome App -> Electron port, though now they've bloated it to do more upsells.

Obsidian.md

Not only Electron apps, also any desktop program made with web technologies.

At an example, let's look at Dropbox desktop programs. In Windows is made mixing Qt, Python scripts, and native solutions (just have a look at the installation folder), resulting in both a worse performance an a use of RAM.

I'd consider Qt (including PyQt) to be a native app. Qt is not something I'd call a "web technology".

That's totally true. I forgot to write that Dropbox uses Qt WebEngine in combination with HTML + CSS + JS to achieve what could be done with just plain Qt with nothing more.

I would argue that a desktop app is an app that does not require a remote server to render the UI. Ideally it would be also useful without access to the internet. In this instance, it should be able to load up, connect to a local db instance running on my machine and allow me to get work done.

As a user the underlying technology does not matter to me. I just need to be able to get stuff done without a WiFi or wired connection.

> Is an electron app really a desktop app?

I don't have a hate on for Electron apps as such, and use quite a few, but they really are the worst of all worlds, particularly from the security point of view: you have all the ability of an Internet-connected web app to execute arbitrary code, but without any of the work that a full browser puts in to try and sandbox the ability to fuck up your machine.

Even OSX uses webviews for "native" ui: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-ma...

For a cloud related settings page. You could as well call it "connects to iCloud via RESTful api"

Oh yeah, another fun one: the content inside the macOS native Dictionary app is HTML styled with CSS!

Is an iOS to macOS Catalyst convered app a Desktop app?

I've litterally done this I'm puzzled myself as to whether I consider it hybrid or native.

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