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I can definitely see a niche in which Electron serves well. However, it seems weird that when talking about mobile apps, the PhoneGap/Cardova "web wrapper" con

I can definitely see a niche in which Electron serves well. However, it seems weird that when talking about mobile apps, the PhoneGap/Cardova "web wrapper" concept is derided as awful compared to native code or maybe cross-plat frameworks. From my anecdotal experience, those same people tend to think that Electron or NW.js are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Electron is PhoneGap for the desktop. That's not necessarily a bad thing or a good thing, it's just a thing that makes sense in certain use cases and not others. The fact that web wrappers have different levels of "street cred" across mobile/desktop contexts feels more subjective than objective. I suspect it's simply a matter of the younger crowd having more exposure to native mobile development, and little or no experience with native desktop development... so this discrepancy reflects those different comfort levels.

kayoone 10y ago
I don't think it's the same people that dislike Cordova and like Electron at the same time. Usually the native-only crowd is against the bloat and performance issues that these wrappers bring in general but of course it is more of a problem on mobile where resources are way more constrained and good UX at the same time is a lot harder to do.
spot 10y ago
desktop is not so cpu constrained, so perceived performance of electron is "fast enough" but on mobile need native code and APIs to get there.
felixrieseberg 10y ago
I'm not sure that that's entirely fair. I for instance don't dislike Cordova for some philosophical reason, but because I have so far hated every single iOS/Android Cordova app - mostly for performance and polish reasons. I do enjoy Visual Studio Code, Atom, Slack, and other apps built with Electron. Yes, people also use it to build horrible apps, but Electron has proven that it's capable of powering apps people love. I have yet to see a Cordova app people love. TL;DR: I love various Electron apps. If I see an amazing Cordova app, I will reconsider my position towards Cordova.
- 0x6c6f6c 10y ago
  Cordova apps performance is the main reason I dislike it. It's wonderful in principle, but when every Cordova app I try seems to have issues like delay and malformed UI components, I find it difficult to appreciate. Electron has been the basis for several great applications though, just looking at their website[0] you can see a good number of apps that look and run great. Discord[1] and Gitkraken[2] among them, for starters. [0]: http://electron.atom.io/ http://electron.atom.io/ [1]: https://discordapp.com/ https://discordapp.com/ [2]: https://www.gitkraken.com/ https://www.gitkraken.com/
  - WorldMaker 10y ago
    I wonder if it is a sample size issue here: the number of Electron apps in the wild is currently fewer and the number of well written apps for seems like something of a statistical anomaly. Meanwhile there seem to be a larger overall number of apps written with Cordova/PhoneGap and the ones everyone notices are the ones that are poorly written. I'd wager that the Cordova apps that are well written are mostly invisible, even given how well most people think they recognize "native" widgets in mobile, the gap between HTML5 performance and native performance I think is narrower than a lot of people give it credit.
    - 0x6c6f6c 10y ago
      > given how well most poeple think they recognize "native" widgets in mobile Every time I've opened a Cordova app I haven't known it was done in Cordova, but immediately thought the app was acting very oddly. Checked the source and yeah, there it is. Cordova. That's not to say that every Cordova app is bad, I'm sure there some that work well, and if I had a need for any of the example apps in their showcase[0] I would have already tested some. HTML5 performance isn't so much the issue as the implementation of the wrapper. Electron stands as a testimonial to the capability of web technologies as an application platform, it's the history of Cordova applications, even in the last month I have tested an up to date Cordova app, and it just doesn't hold up to the hype. And I'm someone who really wants cross-platform web-based development on mobiles to be great.
- 10y ago
untog 10y ago
> the PhoneGap/Cardova "web wrapper" concept is derided as awful compared to native code Yes, but mobile and desktop are quite different. For one, desktop has a lot more power - one of the biggest issues with PhoneGap etc. is that it's just slow, and, particularly, single threaded. That doesn't matter so much on desktop. Also the other complaint is that PhoneGap doesn't use native UI components. Desktop has a huge variety in UI compared to mobile (think Microsoft Word vs Photoshop) - another "not native" format isn't quite as notable. More importantly, though, is that developers hate PhoneGap and the experience it provides. I'd be interested to see the results of a survey where normal users are given a PhoneGap app and asked to point out what's wrong with it. I suspect many would think it's just fine. Not great, but fine. Similarly, if you asked anyone about the Slack desktop app I suspect they'd say it's fine.
- royjacobs 10y ago
  I am genuinely curious, but why would you consider it not as important on a desktop to be fast or easily multi-threaded? Especially the latter is really puzzling to me.
  - ulber 10y ago
    Desktop processors generally have much higher single threaded performance. Thus apps can more often afford to take a performance hit on desktop than on mobile.
    - royjacobs 10y ago
      I think that's where we have a different opinion. The performance incurred by Electron applications is larger than I care to afford them, even on my speedy desktop.
      - ulber 10y ago
        Well, the same actually largely holds for me. Low responsiveness is something I despise in applications. However, the general principle obviously stands: if you have more hardware performance you can be more inefficient and still have good responsiveness. Electron happens to cross the threshold for sensitive users like you and me, but for a large number of users it seems the step in performance from mobile to desktop is enough to buy you the "Electron/PhoneGap/Cordova abstraction" (seeing as how there are popular Electron apps but few for PhoneGap/Cordova).
s_kilk 10y ago
> I suspect it's simply a matter of the younger crowd having more exposure to native mobile development, and little or no experience with native desktop development... Precisely this. Mobile devs care about their artisanal/bespoke/authentic Objective-C or Swift code, while no-one really cares about Qt, GTK or wxWidgets in quite the same way. There's social cachet to be gained by coming out in favour of native mobile development, while the same is not true for native desktop development.
- kitsunesoba 10y ago
  They're obviously no majority but it's quite common for Mac dev to exhibit much of the same care seen in the mobile dev crowd. Given that all Objective-C developers were Mac devs before they were iOS devs, I'd bet that's where that bit of mobile dev culture has its roots.
pjmlp 10y ago
Not me, usually such applications don't get to stay around on my hard disk. Currently I am using Visual Studio Code, because it is one of the best IDE experiences for when I need to play around with Rust. And being pragmatic, I rather enjoy the productivity of VS Code for Rust than being religious about it and losing the said experience.
k__ 10y ago
Yes. The most relevant use case is getting away from different browsers. You doing your web-app, make it responsive and give people who are like "We want to use IE5" an electron wrapper for the web-page.
deleted 10y ago
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rvanmil 10y ago
I think it's because many web apps wrapped by PhoneGap/Cordova are not optimized for touch and UX expectations on a mobile device. I've seen plenty of these "apps" which didn't even bother to properly deal with the tap delay.

kayoone 10y ago

I don't think it's the same people that dislike Cordova and like Electron at the same time. Usually the native-only crowd is against the bloat and performance issues that these wrappers bring in general but of course it is more of a problem on mobile where resources are way more constrained and good UX at the same time is a lot harder to do.

spot 10y ago

desktop is not so cpu constrained, so perceived performance of electron is "fast enough" but on mobile need native code and APIs to get there.

felixrieseberg 10y ago

I'm not sure that that's entirely fair. I for instance don't dislike Cordova for some philosophical reason, but because I have so far hated every single iOS/Android Cordova app - mostly for performance and polish reasons. I do enjoy Visual Studio Code, Atom, Slack, and other apps built with Electron. Yes, people also use it to build horrible apps, but Electron has proven that it's capable of powering apps people love. I have yet to see a Cordova app people love. TL;DR: I love various Electron apps. If I see an amazing Cordova app, I will reconsider my position towards Cordova.

0x6c6f6c 10y ago
Cordova apps performance is the main reason I dislike it. It's wonderful in principle, but when every Cordova app I try seems to have issues like delay and malformed UI components, I find it difficult to appreciate. Electron has been the basis for several great applications though, just looking at their website[0] you can see a good number of apps that look and run great. Discord[1] and Gitkraken[2] among them, for starters. [0]: http://electron.atom.io/ http://electron.atom.io/ [1]: https://discordapp.com/ https://discordapp.com/ [2]: https://www.gitkraken.com/ https://www.gitkraken.com/
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  I wonder if it is a sample size issue here: the number of Electron apps in the wild is currently fewer and the number of well written apps for seems like something of a statistical anomaly. Meanwhile there seem to be a larger overall number of apps written with Cordova/PhoneGap and the ones everyone notices are the ones that are poorly written. I'd wager that the Cordova apps that are well written are mostly invisible, even given how well most people think they recognize "native" widgets in mobile, the gap between HTML5 performance and native performance I think is narrower than a lot of people give it credit.
  - 0x6c6f6c 10y ago
    > given how well most poeple think they recognize "native" widgets in mobile Every time I've opened a Cordova app I haven't known it was done in Cordova, but immediately thought the app was acting very oddly. Checked the source and yeah, there it is. Cordova. That's not to say that every Cordova app is bad, I'm sure there some that work well, and if I had a need for any of the example apps in their showcase[0] I would have already tested some. HTML5 performance isn't so much the issue as the implementation of the wrapper. Electron stands as a testimonial to the capability of web technologies as an application platform, it's the history of Cordova applications, even in the last month I have tested an up to date Cordova app, and it just doesn't hold up to the hype. And I'm someone who really wants cross-platform web-based development on mobiles to be great.
10y ago

untog 10y ago

> the PhoneGap/Cardova "web wrapper" concept is derided as awful compared to native code Yes, but mobile and desktop are quite different. For one, desktop has a lot more power - one of the biggest issues with PhoneGap etc. is that it's just slow, and, particularly, single threaded. That doesn't matter so much on desktop. Also the other complaint is that PhoneGap doesn't use native UI components. Desktop has a huge variety in UI compared to mobile (think Microsoft Word vs Photoshop) - another "not native" format isn't quite as notable. More importantly, though, is that developers hate PhoneGap and the experience it provides. I'd be interested to see the results of a survey where normal users are given a PhoneGap app and asked to point out what's wrong with it. I suspect many would think it's just fine. Not great, but fine. Similarly, if you asked anyone about the Slack desktop app I suspect they'd say it's fine.

royjacobs 10y ago
I am genuinely curious, but why would you consider it not as important on a desktop to be fast or easily multi-threaded? Especially the latter is really puzzling to me.
- ulber 10y ago
  Desktop processors generally have much higher single threaded performance. Thus apps can more often afford to take a performance hit on desktop than on mobile.
  - royjacobs 10y ago
    I think that's where we have a different opinion. The performance incurred by Electron applications is larger than I care to afford them, even on my speedy desktop.
    - ulber 10y ago
      Well, the same actually largely holds for me. Low responsiveness is something I despise in applications. However, the general principle obviously stands: if you have more hardware performance you can be more inefficient and still have good responsiveness. Electron happens to cross the threshold for sensitive users like you and me, but for a large number of users it seems the step in performance from mobile to desktop is enough to buy you the "Electron/PhoneGap/Cordova abstraction" (seeing as how there are popular Electron apps but few for PhoneGap/Cordova).

s_kilk 10y ago

> I suspect it's simply a matter of the younger crowd having more exposure to native mobile development, and little or no experience with native desktop development... Precisely this. Mobile devs care about their artisanal/bespoke/authentic Objective-C or Swift code, while no-one really cares about Qt, GTK or wxWidgets in quite the same way. There's social cachet to be gained by coming out in favour of native mobile development, while the same is not true for native desktop development.

kitsunesoba 10y ago
They're obviously no majority but it's quite common for Mac dev to exhibit much of the same care seen in the mobile dev crowd. Given that all Objective-C developers were Mac devs before they were iOS devs, I'd bet that's where that bit of mobile dev culture has its roots.

pjmlp 10y ago

Not me, usually such applications don't get to stay around on my hard disk. Currently I am using Visual Studio Code, because it is one of the best IDE experiences for when I need to play around with Rust. And being pragmatic, I rather enjoy the productivity of VS Code for Rust than being religious about it and losing the said experience.

k__ 10y ago

Yes. The most relevant use case is getting away from different browsers. You doing your web-app, make it responsive and give people who are like "We want to use IE5" an electron wrapper for the web-page.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

rvanmil 10y ago

I think it's because many web apps wrapped by PhoneGap/Cordova are not optimized for touch and UX expectations on a mobile device. I've seen plenty of these "apps" which didn't even bother to properly deal with the tap delay.