Seriously, any devs that use Electron rather than programming for an operating system's natively provided APIs are lazy and/or incompetent and very disrespectful of peoples' computers and time.
This is such an aggressively bad take. This is disrespectful of a lot of developers' time. Plenty of open source software I greatly enjoy wouldn't exist on Linux if it wasn't for Electron. Electron is not a choice I would make for myself but to say "if you use it you are incompetent" is just a bad take.
Citation needed.
If my competitors want to waste time and resources hiring people to create 3-4 versions of the same app for different devices/OSes, I gladly welcome it. I'll be a well established incumbent by the time they put out their MVP.
If I can solve an important business need, my customers don't care if I use 120mb of RAM to do it. They certainly don't see it as "disrespectful" if I can save/make them money in the long run.
However, the problem is that you end up with apps that behave differently, miss features, and have different bugs across platforms. Drives people crazy. Just one example: 1Password 7 for Windows shows different search results in a different order compared to the Mac app. Obviously it could be fixed but then a different issue pops up somewhere else.
Instead of adding new features we spent time fixing (making?) various bugs in different ways.
The new 1Password 8 still has a ton of platform-specific code but the core is the same across all desktop and mobile apps. It allows us to get the new features out faster and also spend time on platform-specific code.
Is it the most performant? No. Does your average user care? No.
So in the meantime, I don't really give a crap what the average angsty passive aggressive self-entitled developer thinks about the underpinning framework that my products are written with since frankly, you're not really the target demographic. (For most software).
I might consider respecting them when they start respecting my time and hardware.
The only Electron programs I tolerate are of the Too Big To Evade kind: Steam, Discord, LINE, and DMM Game Player.
The rest can (and have) all take a hike for wasting my electric bills.
Also, don't expect (let alone demand) to earn any respect from users if you don't respect them in the first place. It's really that simple.
It's very vary poor outlook on other people to think their lazy and incompetent. I'm sorry you hold these values but please try and get out of that toxic mentality your publicly showcasing here.
At 1Password we actually did not mind developing separately for every platform. It's been done for years. We build it for ourselves and don't mind putting extra work for better experience.
However, the problem is that you end up with apps that behave differently, miss features, and have different bugs across platforms. Drives people crazy. Just one example: 1Password 7 for Windows shows different search results in a different order compared to the Mac app. Obviously it could be fixed but then a different issue pops up somewhere else.
Instead of adding new features we spent time fixing (making?) various bugs in different ways.
The new 1Password 8 still has a ton of platform-specific code but the core is the same across all desktop and mobile apps. It allows us to get the new features out faster and also spend time on platform-specific code.
In my case I preferred the more tailored to each platform aesthetic, but I can see how that variation could confuse people.
Still a huge fan and recommend 1Password to friends.
but there's solution even for those: fork it :)
I hope the people complaining about electron are the ones that at least put money where their mouth is and donated to those projects if they do expect native versions
No you are absolutely wrong. Laziness is not a factor.
Have you ever had to develop and release an application across 5 operating systems all with different UI APIs while also offering a web based UI too? Perhaps it actually makes a lot of sense to consolidate your code base so you can focus on feature development instead of OS compatibility issues and managing many versions of your software across os targets? This is why electron is appealing. In my experience most people who dislike electron apps are speaking from ignorance. They usually have some sort of irrational prejudice against web technologies.
Yes, writing and maintaining codebases for multiple environments is tedious, but it's part of the job description if you are providing good, solid software for more than one operating environment.
If you argue it's too tedious to maintain six codebases, that is the definition of laziness and you ironically helped reaffirm my argument.
Either suck it up or find a new, less demanding job. Programmers of yore managed to do it and we were all better off for it.
Have you ever run a company or worked on a software team? It's a rhetorical question, it's clear that the answer is a solid no. It's not about convenience, it's about economics and getting shit done. Customers getting a product that works is better than them not getting a product because your company blew all its money trying to hire and manage six software teams, or getting a product that only works on some platforms. What a colossally bad take.
Nope. :V
>but you spent years studying to get a computer science degree
Nope. :V
>later on started a family
Nope. :V
>decided to get a job in Human Resources.
Nope. :V
I'm just a stereotypical self-taught computer nerd of the 90s and early 2000s who saw how lean and effective software of yore were and yearn for those days.
Seriously, we have mundane access to tens and even hundreds of GB of RAM and 5GHz of CPU and what do we use it all for? To try and keep the stuff in the background happy, usually Windows or Chrome in this day and age.
The better hardware becomes, the worse software becomes to waste the hardware even harder. Fuck this noise, I want my childhood computers of badassitude back.