I completely understand why people are moving to electron apps. Recently, I began work on what was to be a crossplatform desktop app, with a goal of being nice

I completely understand why people are moving to electron apps. Recently, I began work on what was to be a crossplatform desktop app, with a goal of being nice looking, and easy to use. Most of my previous experience was in android development, a little bit of web development (no applications though, only document based sites) and design work. I do most of my development work on a Mac so I decided I was going to start with a native Mac app (learning swift along the way) and then deal with the windows side later. Swift itself was very easy for me to pick up, but the rest of the experience was a nightmare. The application involved a few components that were going to be quite complex and I wanted many of the basic components to have slight customizations. This turned out to be quite a bit more difficult than I thought. The numerous issues that I encountered in 3-4 weeks (part time) of native development for MacOS included * Xcode support for swift is garbage. Highlighting, code completion, and general responsiveness are far lower than even web based editors. Also no refactoring. * Lack of documentation in swift + cocoa + appkit * Lack of documentation for swift 3. Many examples were from either iOS (not everything is equivalent) or from older versions of swift (a lot has changed in 2 years apparently). Even basics of naming have changed a good bit. * There was a lot of magic going on in xcode with storyboards / interface builder. When something broke it was very difficult to figure out what went wrong in the storyboard. The generated code from the storyboards is useless to look through. The difference between code working or not could be me forgetting to option + click a part of interface builder to a certain line in my code, with little or no indication of whether it had been done correctly, or what needed to go where, particularly with certain appkit components. * Dependancies are a heck a of a lot harder to manage. I don’t know why but I ended up using Cocoapods and it was a total mess. * Many core UI components requiring me to extend them or recreate them for basic functionality that would be a single line of code/xml/css on other platforms. Components that are common in other desktop applications don’t seem to be included in AppKit (some are including in UIKit though) I ended up scrapping the idea of doing it natively and decided on Electron + React + Typescript. It was a lot easier to aquire and intergrate dependencies, the development enviroment is a lot faster, there’s no magic connecting my UI together, and it’s actually easier to recreate customizable, native looking components with css + js than it seems to be in AppKit. On top of that I won’t have to build a seperate windows app. Realistically my app currently looks and performs better than any competing app (many of which are legacy java+swing apps) and is a lot faster to iterate on.