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Comment by gregwebs | Hacker News Reader

NotesNook has e2e encryption and seems to check all the same boxes? Not sure if it uses electron on desktop or not but the mobile app works well.

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yeah notesnook is really cool with lots of features but the client does seem to be electron based.

If it is built with web tech but is not available as a web app (only Electron), that presumably means it is using features that you can't get only using web APIs.

I also build a web-tech-based note-taking app, and honestly I resisted wrapping the thing in Electron for a long time for the same reasons HNers love to hate on Electron wrappers, but honestly people like having an actual "app" (even if it is Electron) way, way more than they enjoy using a web app, in our experience.

You can still access our app via web only, but almost nobody does because they like the apps much better.

I agree, an actual app can certainly get access to more APIs and have a tighter integration with the platform. So it depends on whether you actually want a tighter integration. If you're like me and prefer the note taking app to be minimalist with no bells and whistles then a PWA would be a great fit. For example, Unforget doesn't have background sync, push notifications, reminders, etc. etc. and for my needs that's perfectly fine.

> but honestly people like having an actual "app" (even if it is Electron)

Do you mean because of the tighter platform integration and more features? or the fact that it is an icon on your home screen? if you mean the latter then a PWA is actually quite nice. Some non-techie people I showed this to were quite impressed and excited to find out that they could just add a website to their home screen that acts like an actual app including working offline.

Honestly no, it's not really about the native APIs at all. People just like having an app that doesn't feel like a website at all, and you can't quite get rid of that feeling with a PWA. We started trying to push PWA, and uptake wasn't great. Then we wrapped our web app in Electron and Capacitor and people loved it, even though we hadn't actually integrated with really any of the platform APIs.

It’s likely because people have a hard time switching between browser tabs and would rather switch between applications.

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