Ask HN: Are cross-platform frameworks worth it?

Things like Electron and React Native / Expo always seem really cool. Write once, run anywhere.

When you see how large and well-resourced the companies are who use these frameworks, it really makes you feel as a solo dev, how could you possibly go a different direction. If they have all the money and man-power, and they can't build for each platform specifically, what chance do you have.

For example: VSCode/Discord/Slack use Electron, Facebook Messenger Desktop uses React Native Desktop.

I've finally concluded that it's not worth it. I'm sick to death of battling against some abstraction and build process, to try and do something that I KNOW how I would do it natively. Like when you are trying to get an ORM to do something that you know exactly how you would write yourself in SQL.

We now have declarative UI APIs for each platform (SwiftUI for macOS/iOS and Jetpack for Android), and building on native tech allows better performance, less ram usage, faster startup, smoother animations, more integrated feel.

I really feel like the dream of write once, run anywhere has sailed. Instead of creating abstraction layers in a single language, we should embrace each platform, and use smart code/project generation if we must, allowing the user to fallback to the native language and technology. It just doesn't feel that difficult to learn Swift and Kotlin.