> I would wager there are 100x the number of Qt/GTK apps than there are electron apps. That number could go up or down by an order of magnitude, and the older widget-based toolkits would still be ahead. So ... I don't think that citing numbers of developers doing X or Y is helpful here.
If making the comparison is not helpful, then why make the comparison in the first place? I was just observing that "many" developers made the choice to use Electron; I am not trying to compare numbers of developers here.
> More similar to WxWidgets then, which uses native widgets but wraps them in lowest common denominator API. For one reason or another WxWidgets hasn't been as successful as one might expect.
Yeah, although I think WxWidgets abstracts too much.
Maybe I can frame it this way--I'm not really against cross-platform toolkits in the first place, and I'm not complaining about cross-platform toolkits on a conceptual level. I do think that apps made with cross-platform toolkits often have UX problems and I think part of the reason is because the underlying platforms are too different. Those differences are both (edit: fix) technical differences and differences of conventions / expectations.
React Native seems to have less abstraction. Maybe that's just my subjective thoughts on it.
> Anyway, as I've noted elsewhere in this thread, the majority of creative apps (including Logic) barely use any of the native toolkit within their main windows.
Sure, if you focus narrowly on the main content of the main window, you'll see less of the native toolkit being used. But that's only one part of the app, and it's still built to match platform expectations, in a way that is not easily abstracted out by cross-platform toolkits.
Logic is a bit of a funny example because Apple has a separate set of "pro" widgets they use for their creative apps, like Logic and Final Cut. You can see that, for example, Logic has a decent number of .nib files, which means that it's making use of the native toolkit, even if it's not everywhere.