Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

I felt that this article didn't provide strong justifications for some of its assertions.

> Native APIs are terrible to use, and OS vendors use everything in their power to make you not want to develop native apps for their platform.

Disagree. I'm most familiar with Windows and Android - but native apps on those platforms, snd also on Mac, look pretty good when using the default tools and libraries. Yes, its possible to use (say) material design and other ux-overkill approaches on native, but thats a choice just like it us for web apps.

And OS vendors are very much incentivised to make natuve development as easy and painless as possible - because lock-in.

> That explains the rise of Electron before LLM times,

Disagree. The "rise of Electron" is due to the economics of skill-set convergence on JS, the ubiquity of the JS/HTML/CSS/Node stack platform, and many junior developers knowing little or nothing else.

As for the rest: minor variations in traffic light positioning and corner radii are topical but hardly indicators of decaying platorms.

The rise of Electron was purely because you can share the codebase for real with the web app (for lots of apps it is their main focus) and get cross-platform support for free.

Native apps are not bad to develop when using Swift or C#, they are nice to use and their UI frameworks are fine, it's just that it requires a separate team. With Electron you need much less, simple as that.

> As for the rest: minor variations in traffic light positioning and corner radii are topical but hardly indicators of decaying platorms.

I think it shows how important the platform itself is to the company. The system settings app on macOS is literally slow to change the topic (the detail page is updated like ~500ms after clicking).

I personally love to develop desktop apps but business-wise they rarely make sense these days.

> Disagree. The "rise of Electron" is due to the ubiquity of the JS/HTML/CSS/Node stack, and many junior developers knowing nothing else.

with all due respect - hard disagree. in what place on Earth to Junior Devs make these types of decisions?? Or decision makers going “we got these Juniors that know JS so it is what is…”

I don't believe they were implying they would make the decision. It's expensive to have your team learn new skills from scratch, and management won't want to pay for that if they don't have to.

I have been coding for 30 years now and I have never encountered a technical decision like choosing technology (e.g. Electron) for anything important to the company being made with "oh, we must use X because so and so knows X"

Maybe if there was a toss-up between X and Y or something like that but to flat-out pick Electron because you have people that knows JS is madness

I'm thirty+ years in too, and it happens all the time - particularly in smaller operations. Resourcing constraints, disinclination to provide training, tight deadlines, etc.

so interesting!! and scary :)

This is indeed what I meant. Thanks for stating it with more clarity than I was able to.

While that's not what the author meant - in all places on Earth where they people grow up and become powerful enough to make those decisions (but also before that , in their own little apps)

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