I don't think Java as an app platform ever really recovered from the reputation in picked up in the 90s in the form of applets (which were notorious for crashin

I don't think Java as an app platform ever really recovered from the reputation in picked up in the 90s in the form of applets (which were notorious for crashing your browser/machine) and in the 00s with desktop apps due to the high startup time and often alien-feeling UI toolkits. I recall back in the 2000s there being a few Java apps for macOS that used Cocoa UIs via the Cocoa-Java bridge that used to exist. These tended to be embraced almost as readily by users as full-native Mac apps, and I think that was largely because these apps tended to start up more quickly and fit into the user's desktop better, removing those two barriers to adoption.