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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

That's fine. I just don't really see much of a use for this personally, especially if it's Another Competing Standard for video calls. I've been able to get similar results by just pinning a Google Meet window at the top of my screen, but maybe I'm missing a killer feature here?

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Fair enough. Many of our users used to do what you do.

Reasons they sometimes switch from long-lived Meet calls:

- Free up 200-300 MB of RAM when in call.

- Features specific to coworking (e.g. shared music DJing) or eng pairing (e.g. multi-way screen share).

- Presence when out of video calls. For example, you'd see if anyone on your team is in the Meet without having to ping each other. Leads to more unplanned hang outs.

Considering that people mostly use either webapps in a browser, or Electron-based 'native' apps, does saving 300 MB with a specific app really makes that much of difference?

I do understand that macOS APIs and libraries are easy to use, development experience is (at least in my opinion) better than with Electron + framework of your choice, and you can achieve better integration with the OS, but I don't think that saving 200-300 MB is really important to the end users.

TBH we weren't sure how much people would care. What we've found is that when we build a bucket of value props to solve for a given use case (e.g. eng coworking), different users will find different value props to resonate.

So some people are very glad to save RAM, CPU, etc. Others don't care but love shared music DJing etc...

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