Comment by irskep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by irskep | Hacker News Reader

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Electron apps are already out of place. In the space of Mac-apps-for-SaaS-products such as Linear, Slack, Notion, Asana, Figma, GitHub, and Spotify, they inflict the company's own design system on Apple's OS rather than try to ship Apple's design system applied to their product. Even the most popular IDE, VSCode, is just a wrapper around a web page.

And they're rational to do it this way. These companies shipping apps to millions of people all came to the conclusion that investing in native Mac software is not worthwhile to their business. Users don't avoid Electron-based products, and building native Mac apps slows you down. It's easier both technologically and organizationally to ship your web site as an Electron app. It costs less and you don't lose any users.

So I would be surprised to see _any_ popular Electron app get design updates to accommodate these changes.

As a user it makes me sad, but I find myself blaming Apple for losing this fight, not the hundreds of successful companies that all somehow make the same choice. If building native were an advantage, people would take it.

I certainly avoid Electron apps on macOS and konw I am not the only one who does.

Which apps do you avoid in particular which are associated with a service you are required by your job to use? Or, what purchasing decisions have you made on behalf of your company that took Electron-ness into account?

So when you have mention 'users' it was actually about 'companies'?

It was actually about customers and incentives. You're right that I shouldn't have said "users;" I should have said "customers."

It's rational for businesses to do things that make them money, and to not do things that don't make them money or make them lose money. SaaS business believe that spending R&D budgets on growth hackers and web product engineers is a better return than spending those same budgets on macOS engineers. I suspect they are right.

It doesn't matter to these businesses that you personally avoid Electron apps. They don't care, and Apple has made it easy and rewarding for them not to care.

> Which apps do you avoid in particular which are associated with a service you are required by your job to use?

Electron apps are not all B2B or associated with a service. This restriction is odd.

> Or, what purchasing decisions have you made on behalf of your company that took Electron-ness into account?

Password manager. PDF software. REST client. Other developer tools.

> Electron apps are already out of place.

You're taking the boring argument track here. Yes, they use their own design system language, but they still roughly fit in with an OS that's not random transparency/glass effects everywhere.

They clearly will not fit in with the new UI styling without significant thought and work.

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