In my opinion, I suspect that many people shipping electron-based apps would gladly switch to a native toolkit if there was a dead easy way to develop cross-pla

In my opinion, I suspect that many people shipping electron-based apps would gladly switch to a native toolkit if there was a dead easy way to develop cross-platform GUIs. In the 90s and early 00s, there were many easy language products like Delphi, VB, and others who were much easier to use than C++ and friends. Cross-platform could be done with REBOL, REALBasic (aka Xojo), Runtime Revolution (aka LiveCode) and many other languages. Users didn't expected fancy flat animated user interfaces made of 100% custom controls, people were fine with normal native standard stuff as long as the app worked. Now, there is no easy way to build cross-platform apps that is easier than electron. Languages like modern C++ and Rust are extremely powerful but they require more experienced developer to be used effectively. GUI toolkits like Qt and wx, are good but a ton of UX professionals now are trained to ship UIs in tools like figma, skewing all the native controls and creating beautiful masterpieces that are easier to do with HTML/CSS than implement with a native toolkit. Native apps got harder to do not because we don't have access to the tech we had, but because of added friction. It is like death by a thousand paper cuts. You make the professionals designing the UX/UI create interfaces that are harder to reproduce with native technology, then you select a GUI toolkit such as Qt/wx and try to reimplement that using whatever language is best. It takes longer than developing an electron app, requires more expensive developers. Don't get me wrong, it will be a better product, but it will take longer, be more expensive, and will need to be done with more care. And after the app is done, there is the need to deal with all the sandboxes and crazy stuff that Apple requires these days if you're shipping a native mac app. Many electron apps sidestep a lot of this by simply being thin clients for some SaaS company and doing the hard stuff on a server (which also opens an opportunity for mining the data for our capitalists overlords). The barrier for entry for developing an electron app is so low. JS is an easy language to start. There are so many ready made UI kits. You can have a small app running before a new developer can understand how the new pointer stuff work on modern C++. All that text is to say that I think we need easier languages and toolkits that target native experiences. Something like Lazarus, LiveCode, are all steps in the right direction for me.