Not really, the reason is laziness and seeing nails everywhere, instead of picking the right tool.
Coding GUI/TUIs since MS-DOS and Amiga 500 days, and Web since 1996.
Coding GUI/TUIs since MS-DOS and Amiga 500 days, and Web since 1996.
Speaking as a user, that's exactly what I don't like. I don't care about same UX on every platform; I'd rather have consistent UX across apps on the same platform.
As a user I prefer something that works, making sure one thing works consistently is easier than testing different native things that implement the same functionality. (Oh, and as a user I very much prefer that it does implement the same functionality.)
Native interfaces and behaviour are preferable over whatever options the app developer chooses to support.
In the case of electron apps, effectively running multiple browsers is also in the “what not to like” basket.
Native apps often have less input latency, and are significantly nicer to use.
> Allows faster iteration for small teams
As a user, I’d much, much prefer slower iteration if it meant the resulting app was better. Electron apps thrashing out pointless updates every other day just because they can isn’t always a positive in my book.
On desktop I don't run slack, discord, teams (and whatever wants to run separately) separately, if something that doesn't do meaningful local I/O and/or computation cannot run in a browser, then I don't use it if I can avoid it at all. And I hopefully can keep my streak of not developing nor shipping any forced electron based mess.
VSCode is fast. I'm surprised too. While native Windows things are just slow all over (with a beefy modern desktop).
Seriously, how the fuck can the start menu be this ridiculously slow? I have like 50 things installed, and I use about 5 of those. And it takes forever to find those as I start typing. (I have KDE flashbacks!)
Oh and super native Firefox is also a disaster when it comes to speed (I search for the same bookmarked pages in the awesomebar - the combined location and search bar, I have disabled the search part, because the UX was horrible, so it should just search in the local recency shorted LRU cached list of pages ... and it's dog slow and dumb).
Big billion dollar unicorns push those meaningless updates, not small teams (at least in my experience).
Everything. Make a website if that's what you want.
Mozilla tried "Firefox OS" and it's hard to do it. Chrome tried service workers and persistent sites/apps, but.. it's just lame compared to shipping a separate app that bundles a web view and a backend.