19 ms·

Still waiting for a native MacOS app that doesn't slow my machine down to a crawl and runs the fans whenever I made a video call. $7.1B folks. $7.1 billion.

mechazawa 8y ago
And one that doesn't use >1GB ram when idle
joelhaasnoot 8y ago
And honestly, how hard can it be? Put a 5 man team on it and in a few months it'll be done and workable. Few million down the drain but your software is insanely more useable. I guess that doesn't sell the service...
- drb91 8y ago
  No need! Everyone is already so happy with the electron version; why would they waste more money improving your experience?
  - ihuman 8y ago
    Because not everyone is already happy with the electron version?
    - drb91 8y ago
      (I was sarcastic!)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- hvidgaard 8y ago
  Lets assume well paid developers of $150.000 yearly, 5 man for 3 months is less than $187.500 is wages. Lets be generous and say we double that to account for other expenses. It's $375.000 for a feature that will be a reasonable sales argument.
  - spyridonas 8y ago
    Let's throw these money and work hours to electron contribution! It will make every electron app faster
    - cmiles74 8y ago
      I think Google is already throwing enough money at Chromium for all of us (Electron runs on top of Chromium AFAICT). In my opinion, Google's expectation is that you run one instance of Chromium per machine. Electron wants to run one per application. Hence performance woes.
  - mercer 8y ago
    Much as I usually try to understand the 'business end' of things, I have to say that I'm baffled that Slack hasn't done this yet. I rather like Slack, and have good reasons to use it (it's pretty central to Elixir's community, for one), but even on my relatively beefy MBP (2015) I actively avoid having the app open because it's a heavy Electron piece of shit. While of course I might be a bit of an outlier as a developer with a preference for 'lighter' applications (and comfortable with CLI stuff), surely I'm not that much of an outlier...
    - pluto9 8y ago
      I think it's typical. The business-minded management folks at tech companies tend to measure success and failure purely in dollars. If the company's financial indicators are good, they assume their trajectory is correct and change nothing. They won't fix or improve existing systems unless an issue is measurably costing them revenue. In the case of the enterprise shop I work at, our revenue increases year over year, and so technical debt doesn't get addressed unless it causes such trouble that clients threaten to leave. Development gets slower and costlier over time as cruft builds up in the codebase, but that effect can't be measured, so it doesn't exist as far as management is concerned. In Slack's case, their indicator of success is the giant valuation they just got. Their desktop app is an annoying resource hog, but hey, they have tremendous market share, so it must not really be a problem for users. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
- fastball 8y ago
  You can think a 5-person team can build highly performant native apps for a number of different platforms in a matter of months?
  - StaticRedux 8y ago
    Yes
    - fastball 8y ago
      Great! Now can you name an app where that actually happened?
  - conradfr 8y ago
    Do they have to do a DSM everyday and retrospective, backlog grooming, sprint planning and whatnot every two weeks? Then no.
  - joelhaasnoot 8y ago
    Start with Mac, find some good metrics that indicate that a lot of your users are on Mac and go from there. (parse your user agents for instance) Once it's proven itself, you can try Windows and some other options as needed (probably mobile).
    - russdpale 8y ago
      You don't even need good metrics. Just write some software that doesn't run like shit. That is the only metric that is needed. If you build it, they will come. Especially if they don't have a choice. So build the new, deprecate the old.
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      Why would someone start with a minor platform? Mac is consistently 5-6 percentage of the market and has been for decades. They honestly have never been a player.
      - 8y ago
- phailhaus 8y ago
  > And honestly, how hard can it be? Excuse me? You think 5 people can 100% replicate Slack natively within "a few months"?
  - throwawaymath 8y ago
    That's not what they said. A significant fraction (probably the majority) of Slack's functionality is server-side, not client-side. Even if the client were to be rewritten from scratch, you would not need to replicate 100% of Slack. But you also don't need to re-implement the entire client. You need to do a significant architectural change for performance improvements, not a complete overhaul. Reasonable people can disagree about whether or not that's feasible for five engineers already familiar with the codebase to do within a few months. Your incredulity at the idea is unwarranted.
    - phailhaus 8y ago
      No, it's pretty warranted. The 100% I was referring to _was_ just for the clientside. To rewrite that natively (since today it's in js on Electron) is not going to take a couple of months with five engineers.
      - mercer 8y ago
        I don't think it's entirely out of the realm of possibility that could be done, and a couple of months with five engineers was a conservative estimate. $375.000 for twice the devs or twice the number of months is still a shockingly low price to pay. Hell, throw a few million at it and I can't see why Slack can't be implemented natively on at least iOS, MacOS and Android (especially if parts can still fallback on webviews).
        TheCoelacanth 8y ago
        It is entirely out of the realm of possibility. There is absolutely no way in hell that even ten engineers for a couple of months could replicate all of Slack's functionality. Even ten times that much would be a stretch. They could maybe make a decent chat app prototype in that amount of time. If they are very talented, they might even be able to make a decent chat app MVP that would get some actual users, but there is absolutely no way that they could replicate all of Slack's functionality.
- iambateman 8y ago
  But once you get to that organizational size, there are 3 project managers and a VP with an agenda and designers and design managers and a QA department which is backed up “for a bit” and a PR team who wants to make sure we get a good Q2’19 “win with the developer crowd”. So it takes a year, and $2.5M, to do what should take 3 months and $300k. * not saying this is the case at Slack, it’s just often the case at Everywhere. ;)
  - peterwwillis 8y ago
    Exactly. A completely rewritten from scratch product would probably take 1 year to finish. 90% complete can be ready in a few months, but the last 10% takes much more effort. Then there's the QA division you need to build out to test it on the platforms and OSes you need to support your enterprise customers. Then there's the management structure to track the project. Then there's keeping it up to date with the existing service's changes as it's both in development and production. Then there's the migration to switch users to the new client, and the phasing out of the old client over time. It's doable, but it's non-trivial, and probably only buys you the accolades of a small percentage of users on slower hardware. (And incidentally, almost every video chat app I use today runs the fans and slows down my system, but I can deal with it)
    - russdpale 8y ago
      Electron apps are for amateurs and small start up teams. Once you are into the 7b valuation range, you need to put on big boy pants, and make big boy software that runs as advertised. No video functionality even needs to exist for it to run terribly. I have never used the video feature, and it causes my entire 4-5 year old system to chug. I can't even consider using it on an old linux machine. People shouldn't have to put up with the system crawl that ensues after firing up slack. It is absurd for the money they charge.
      - chrisco255 8y ago
        VS Code is an Electron app written by the $800B Microsoft. Maybe you've heard of them?
- fizx 8y ago
  Video performance is a LOT harder than you think. At another company, I watched an five person team, half of whom had related PhDs, the other half over a dozen years of video engineering experience, make incremental improvements to the WebRTC stack. After a year, was it better? The metrics said it was somewhat better, but the customers still complained all the time.
  - joelhaasnoot 8y ago
    Ship a Mac client without video. Add video next year once you've proven that people actually use a native Mac client. Some companies call this 'agile' - it's a strange concept.
    - d3sandoval 8y ago
      Video calls (with screen sharing) are the only reason I have the Mac client installed. Otherwise I'd just use the web app...
  - romwell 8y ago
    >Video performance is a LOT harder than you think. But it's been done. Skype video calls worked on far inferior hardware and networks back in the day.
- moistoreos 8y ago
  But Electron man. Electron. (sarcasm)
beager 8y ago
Or one that doesn't drop 5 seconds of call audio when I open a new tab in Chrome. Yes, really.
spyridonas 8y ago
I think contributing to open source and making electron better/faster/lighter will benefit everyone and i prefer it over making a native app
- Tehnix 8y ago
  Unfortunately it’s also vastly less likely to bring the same speed ups in even a 4x time frame. It’s not like the Electron devs are caring about speed at all atm.
Spivak 8y ago
Which is something that people complain about, but isn't enough of a motivator to get anyone to switch. Skype for Business fits the bill of a lean messaging platform with similar features but it's just terrible. Mattermost is pretty cool but it's self-hosted which makes it a non-starter in shops that don't have IT staff. And all the other competing products are basically just Slack clones with less features. So Slack is going to continue eating all your resources, because anyone who cares will switch to a leaner Slack client before they switch away from Slack.
dunpeal 8y ago
I'm guessing they don't care so much because most of their paying users are captive audience. If your work decides to use slack, it's not like you can't opt-out. So they focus more on server-side features that ensure they'll be chosen in the first place.
eagsalazar2 8y ago
Their video offering is laughably bad but I'd bet that isn't because of electron. Otherwise I'm surprised people hate the electron app so much, on my 2014 mbp it works just fine.
- filoleg 8y ago
  Agreed. To support that point, Discord's videocall functionality is probably the best I've seen, despite using electron as well.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- phyzome 8y ago
  Counterpoint: I've found it to work better than Google Meet. But maybe that's not saying much. (Is there any video conferencing software that doesn't suck in some way?)
  - valeg 8y ago
    Jitsi Meet just works for me: https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/
  - theWheez 8y ago
    Zoom has been my best experience. Plenty of features, smooth video for the most part. Enough that I use it exclusively for business at this point.
  - flyinglizard 8y ago
    BlueJeans. Always great.
- lordnacho 8y ago
  I don't know about "just fine". I think its benefits outweigh its problems. I need to stay in touch with my team, and I need those integrations. But even simple stuff like "send when internet connection is back" isn't there, like what WhatsApp has. It also doesn't load very fast for something that you'd think is mostly text. Change teams and you see the spinner a lot. Also when you've come back to WiFi it seems to take ages to get your updates. A lot of these things seem to be "fixed" by killing the app and restarting, which is something of a smell. Also seems to use a lot of memory. Not a huge problem on my machine, but I like elegance.
zerr 8y ago
Same here but for Windows...
Reedx 8y ago
Heck, I'm still waiting for Photoshop to be able to launch and display a static 50KB image in a reasonable amount of time.
russdpale 8y ago
Same for windows, and linux. I refuse to install it and instead use the web app as if it were email. Fortunately, I don't have to use it for work. IMO, the only thing slack does really well, is the threading. But I've ever only been a part of one group that actually used that feature. Every other group uses it like a chat room.
baddox 8y ago
I'm still very curious what combination of variables leads to these complaints about Electron apps. I have never experienced any of these issues, and I have heavily used Electron apps like Slack, Discord, and Visual Studio Code for years on both high-end and modest Apple computers. Electron apps appear to be one of the biggest pain points for people in tech and the HN community, and I find it so bizarre that I relate to exactly zero of those complaints.
gumby 8y ago
What about getting those video calls to work on iOS?

mechazawa 8y ago

And one that doesn't use >1GB ram when idle

joelhaasnoot 8y ago

And honestly, how hard can it be? Put a 5 man team on it and in a few months it'll be done and workable. Few million down the drain but your software is insanely more useable. I guess that doesn't sell the service...

drb91 8y ago
No need! Everyone is already so happy with the electron version; why would they waste more money improving your experience?
- ihuman 8y ago
  Because not everyone is already happy with the electron version?
  - drb91 8y ago
    (I was sarcastic!)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
hvidgaard 8y ago
Lets assume well paid developers of $150.000 yearly, 5 man for 3 months is less than $187.500 is wages. Lets be generous and say we double that to account for other expenses. It's $375.000 for a feature that will be a reasonable sales argument.
- spyridonas 8y ago
  Let's throw these money and work hours to electron contribution! It will make every electron app faster
  - cmiles74 8y ago
    I think Google is already throwing enough money at Chromium for all of us (Electron runs on top of Chromium AFAICT). In my opinion, Google's expectation is that you run one instance of Chromium per machine. Electron wants to run one per application. Hence performance woes.
- mercer 8y ago
  Much as I usually try to understand the 'business end' of things, I have to say that I'm baffled that Slack hasn't done this yet. I rather like Slack, and have good reasons to use it (it's pretty central to Elixir's community, for one), but even on my relatively beefy MBP (2015) I actively avoid having the app open because it's a heavy Electron piece of shit. While of course I might be a bit of an outlier as a developer with a preference for 'lighter' applications (and comfortable with CLI stuff), surely I'm not that much of an outlier...
  - pluto9 8y ago
    I think it's typical. The business-minded management folks at tech companies tend to measure success and failure purely in dollars. If the company's financial indicators are good, they assume their trajectory is correct and change nothing. They won't fix or improve existing systems unless an issue is measurably costing them revenue. In the case of the enterprise shop I work at, our revenue increases year over year, and so technical debt doesn't get addressed unless it causes such trouble that clients threaten to leave. Development gets slower and costlier over time as cruft builds up in the codebase, but that effect can't be measured, so it doesn't exist as far as management is concerned. In Slack's case, their indicator of success is the giant valuation they just got. Their desktop app is an annoying resource hog, but hey, they have tremendous market share, so it must not really be a problem for users. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
fastball 8y ago
You can think a 5-person team can build highly performant native apps for a number of different platforms in a matter of months?
- StaticRedux 8y ago
  Yes
  - fastball 8y ago
    Great! Now can you name an app where that actually happened?
- conradfr 8y ago
  Do they have to do a DSM everyday and retrospective, backlog grooming, sprint planning and whatnot every two weeks? Then no.
- joelhaasnoot 8y ago
  Start with Mac, find some good metrics that indicate that a lot of your users are on Mac and go from there. (parse your user agents for instance) Once it's proven itself, you can try Windows and some other options as needed (probably mobile).
  - russdpale 8y ago
    You don't even need good metrics. Just write some software that doesn't run like shit. That is the only metric that is needed. If you build it, they will come. Especially if they don't have a choice. So build the new, deprecate the old.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    Why would someone start with a minor platform? Mac is consistently 5-6 percentage of the market and has been for decades. They honestly have never been a player.
    - 8y ago
phailhaus 8y ago
> And honestly, how hard can it be? Excuse me? You think 5 people can 100% replicate Slack natively within "a few months"?
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  That's not what they said. A significant fraction (probably the majority) of Slack's functionality is server-side, not client-side. Even if the client were to be rewritten from scratch, you would not need to replicate 100% of Slack. But you also don't need to re-implement the entire client. You need to do a significant architectural change for performance improvements, not a complete overhaul. Reasonable people can disagree about whether or not that's feasible for five engineers already familiar with the codebase to do within a few months. Your incredulity at the idea is unwarranted.
  - phailhaus 8y ago
    No, it's pretty warranted. The 100% I was referring to _was_ just for the clientside. To rewrite that natively (since today it's in js on Electron) is not going to take a couple of months with five engineers.
    - mercer 8y ago
      I don't think it's entirely out of the realm of possibility that could be done, and a couple of months with five engineers was a conservative estimate. $375.000 for twice the devs or twice the number of months is still a shockingly low price to pay. Hell, throw a few million at it and I can't see why Slack can't be implemented natively on at least iOS, MacOS and Android (especially if parts can still fallback on webviews).
      - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
        It is entirely out of the realm of possibility. There is absolutely no way in hell that even ten engineers for a couple of months could replicate all of Slack's functionality. Even ten times that much would be a stretch. They could maybe make a decent chat app prototype in that amount of time. If they are very talented, they might even be able to make a decent chat app MVP that would get some actual users, but there is absolutely no way that they could replicate all of Slack's functionality.
iambateman 8y ago
But once you get to that organizational size, there are 3 project managers and a VP with an agenda and designers and design managers and a QA department which is backed up “for a bit” and a PR team who wants to make sure we get a good Q2’19 “win with the developer crowd”. So it takes a year, and $2.5M, to do what should take 3 months and $300k. * not saying this is the case at Slack, it’s just often the case at Everywhere. ;)
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  Exactly. A completely rewritten from scratch product would probably take 1 year to finish. 90% complete can be ready in a few months, but the last 10% takes much more effort. Then there's the QA division you need to build out to test it on the platforms and OSes you need to support your enterprise customers. Then there's the management structure to track the project. Then there's keeping it up to date with the existing service's changes as it's both in development and production. Then there's the migration to switch users to the new client, and the phasing out of the old client over time. It's doable, but it's non-trivial, and probably only buys you the accolades of a small percentage of users on slower hardware. (And incidentally, almost every video chat app I use today runs the fans and slows down my system, but I can deal with it)
  - russdpale 8y ago
    Electron apps are for amateurs and small start up teams. Once you are into the 7b valuation range, you need to put on big boy pants, and make big boy software that runs as advertised. No video functionality even needs to exist for it to run terribly. I have never used the video feature, and it causes my entire 4-5 year old system to chug. I can't even consider using it on an old linux machine. People shouldn't have to put up with the system crawl that ensues after firing up slack. It is absurd for the money they charge.
    - chrisco255 8y ago
      VS Code is an Electron app written by the $800B Microsoft. Maybe you've heard of them?
fizx 8y ago
Video performance is a LOT harder than you think. At another company, I watched an five person team, half of whom had related PhDs, the other half over a dozen years of video engineering experience, make incremental improvements to the WebRTC stack. After a year, was it better? The metrics said it was somewhat better, but the customers still complained all the time.
- joelhaasnoot 8y ago
  Ship a Mac client without video. Add video next year once you've proven that people actually use a native Mac client. Some companies call this 'agile' - it's a strange concept.
  - d3sandoval 8y ago
    Video calls (with screen sharing) are the only reason I have the Mac client installed. Otherwise I'd just use the web app...
- romwell 8y ago
  >Video performance is a LOT harder than you think. But it's been done. Skype video calls worked on far inferior hardware and networks back in the day.
moistoreos 8y ago
But Electron man. Electron. (sarcasm)

beager 8y ago

Or one that doesn't drop 5 seconds of call audio when I open a new tab in Chrome. Yes, really.

spyridonas 8y ago

I think contributing to open source and making electron better/faster/lighter will benefit everyone and i prefer it over making a native app

Tehnix 8y ago
Unfortunately it’s also vastly less likely to bring the same speed ups in even a 4x time frame. It’s not like the Electron devs are caring about speed at all atm.

Spivak 8y ago

Which is something that people complain about, but isn't enough of a motivator to get anyone to switch. Skype for Business fits the bill of a lean messaging platform with similar features but it's just terrible. Mattermost is pretty cool but it's self-hosted which makes it a non-starter in shops that don't have IT staff. And all the other competing products are basically just Slack clones with less features. So Slack is going to continue eating all your resources, because anyone who cares will switch to a leaner Slack client before they switch away from Slack.

dunpeal 8y ago

I'm guessing they don't care so much because most of their paying users are captive audience. If your work decides to use slack, it's not like you can't opt-out. So they focus more on server-side features that ensure they'll be chosen in the first place.

eagsalazar2 8y ago

Their video offering is laughably bad but I'd bet that isn't because of electron. Otherwise I'm surprised people hate the electron app so much, on my 2014 mbp it works just fine.

filoleg 8y ago
Agreed. To support that point, Discord's videocall functionality is probably the best I've seen, despite using electron as well.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
phyzome 8y ago
Counterpoint: I've found it to work better than Google Meet. But maybe that's not saying much. (Is there any video conferencing software that doesn't suck in some way?)
- valeg 8y ago
  Jitsi Meet just works for me: https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/
- theWheez 8y ago
  Zoom has been my best experience. Plenty of features, smooth video for the most part. Enough that I use it exclusively for business at this point.
- flyinglizard 8y ago
  BlueJeans. Always great.
lordnacho 8y ago
I don't know about "just fine". I think its benefits outweigh its problems. I need to stay in touch with my team, and I need those integrations. But even simple stuff like "send when internet connection is back" isn't there, like what WhatsApp has. It also doesn't load very fast for something that you'd think is mostly text. Change teams and you see the spinner a lot. Also when you've come back to WiFi it seems to take ages to get your updates. A lot of these things seem to be "fixed" by killing the app and restarting, which is something of a smell. Also seems to use a lot of memory. Not a huge problem on my machine, but I like elegance.

zerr 8y ago

Same here but for Windows...

Reedx 8y ago

Heck, I'm still waiting for Photoshop to be able to launch and display a static 50KB image in a reasonable amount of time.

russdpale 8y ago

Same for windows, and linux. I refuse to install it and instead use the web app as if it were email. Fortunately, I don't have to use it for work. IMO, the only thing slack does really well, is the threading. But I've ever only been a part of one group that actually used that feature. Every other group uses it like a chat room.

baddox 8y ago

I'm still very curious what combination of variables leads to these complaints about Electron apps. I have never experienced any of these issues, and I have heavily used Electron apps like Slack, Discord, and Visual Studio Code for years on both high-end and modest Apple computers. Electron apps appear to be one of the biggest pain points for people in tech and the HN community, and I find it so bizarre that I relate to exactly zero of those complaints.

gumby 8y ago

What about getting those video calls to work on iOS?