> The number one cost at most companies, is humans. Before electron what did you have for cross platform development? Why does development have to be cross pl

> The number one cost at most companies, is humans. Before electron what did you have for cross platform development? Why does development have to be cross platform? If you are a startup with a small team, and you truly only have two or three developers, then I can understand this desire. I totally understand the "this was my side project" or "we're just four people in a garage" arguments. I get it. But most products people complain about are from billion dollar corporations that could easily handle having totally different codebases for 4+ platforms clients, (with way more total lines, but only a little bit more complexity and cost) than one single cross-platform super-client. Humans are not expensive to these companies, and we're only talking about adding a few more. From my own personal experience, writing a native Java Android version and a native Windows UWP C# version of the same app, the effort + maintenance of those two codebases combined was only a little bit more effort than writing one HTML+JS+Electron-ish project that spits out an Android and Windows version. Native code just isn't that difficult if you spend a little bit of time learning their APIs (I would argue it's actually simpler than modern web frontend). I understand why companies choose Electron instead -- and I've even had to do so myself at times, I get that. It's great for small projects or low-budget projects or internal-only uses, etc. But it's not unreasonable for people to complain a little bit when these large hyper-popular billion-dollar services (like Slack or Spotify or Twitter) cheap out a bit on their software in that way.