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> Even Microsoft products such as Teams and Azure Storage Explorer use Electron, not native Windows APIs. You forgot the big one, Visual Studio Code - a runawa

> Even Microsoft products such as Teams and Azure Storage Explorer use Electron, not native Windows APIs. You forgot the big one, Visual Studio Code - a runaway success, and an electron app. The reason they don't build these as UWP apps is because they are cross-platform. UWP is currently only available on Windows, and they want VSCode etc to run on MacOS and Linux. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they bring the UWP platform to MacOS and Linux in the near future. It makes perfect sense (apart from the name, but MS is no stranger to renaming things) > Ordinary users can't tell an app built using Electron from a native Windows app. Thanks to Metro and its bland flatness, Windows apps does not have a differentiated look & feel, so end users don't know to demand Windows native apps. I'm really not sure what you mean here. Metro is bland and flat if you design your app that way, and a lot of people design electron apps specifically "flat" to avoid them looking like a particular OS. android and ios apps look like this, I think its just a natural trend of the software / UI industry that apps are starting to look homogenous. I personally don't like it though. I like file menus like old school forms apps. If that's what you mean then I agree. > So developers are better off using cross-platform technologies such as Electron. Not for design reasons!

WorldMaker 9y ago
«I wouldn't be at all surprised if they bring the UWP platform to MacOS and Linux in the near future.» Xamarin announced support for Linux and macOS at BUILD, and from what I hear most of the work is fairly far along (on GitHub). So if Xamarin is the "React Native" to the UWP's C#/XAML platform, Electron and Cordova are still useful cross-platform runtimes for the UWP's JS/HTML stack. I think the messaging from Microsoft seems pretty clear that web-based apps of all sorts (PWAs, Electron, Cordova, UWP JS/HTML, etc) are still welcome on Windows as "first-class" apps and that it's up to team productivity and preference which platform to use. It shouldn't be a surprise to see a bunch of Microsoft-built Electron apps now, because JS/HTML has always been in the UWP "big tent". (There has even been some cool work done to bring more of the Electron apps more directly into UWP containers, and making them more directly first class UWP citizens, and I hope that work continues.)

WorldMaker 9y ago

«I wouldn't be at all surprised if they bring the UWP platform to MacOS and Linux in the near future.» Xamarin announced support for Linux and macOS at BUILD, and from what I hear most of the work is fairly far along (on GitHub). So if Xamarin is the "React Native" to the UWP's C#/XAML platform, Electron and Cordova are still useful cross-platform runtimes for the UWP's JS/HTML stack. I think the messaging from Microsoft seems pretty clear that web-based apps of all sorts (PWAs, Electron, Cordova, UWP JS/HTML, etc) are still welcome on Windows as "first-class" apps and that it's up to team productivity and preference which platform to use. It shouldn't be a surprise to see a bunch of Microsoft-built Electron apps now, because JS/HTML has always been in the UWP "big tent". (There has even been some cool work done to bring more of the Electron apps more directly into UWP containers, and making them more directly first class UWP citizens, and I hope that work continues.)