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I think more effort should be put into cross browser support, but that said. > "I want web sites to do everything a native app can do" is a suicidal mistake.

I think more effort should be put into cross browser support, but that said. > "I want web sites to do everything a native app can do" is a suicidal mistake. Most Mac users are just using MacOS as a windowing system to run Chromes browser engines multiple times across the bunch of Electron apps they use to do their work. The age where Mac users were mostly working all day in native Cocoa apps is long dead, I think I might be the only person in my office that uses a text editor running on Cocoa not Chrome. We didn't get here by accident, end of the day Figma is better than Sketch, Google Docs is better than passing Pages files around, Google Maps in a browser window where your actual research is happening is better than opening the Apple Maps app and Slack is better for work than Messages. The world moved forward, Jeff might not like which tech stack it chose but no one is making anything written "natively" on Macs that can compete, and it's silly to say that it shouldn't exist while that fact is true.

viktorcode 5y ago
We ended here for pure business reasons, and not as a convenience for end users. JavaScript programmers are dime a dozen comparing to Cocoa programmers. What we ended up with is suite of software almost no one uses on their free choice.
- tolmasky 5y ago
  The business decision Apple made to largely ignore Cocoa, especially any semblance of documentation, and then confuse “native developers” by giving them conflicting half-baked solutions like Catalyst and SwiftUI? I guess given the option between a closed-source half-assed framework like Catalyst that even Apple themselves can’t make reasonable apps with (see Apple News), and an open source half-assed framework like Electron where you can at least contribute a fix instead of having to wait a full year for the surprise of whether your reported issue got fixed or not, most people just preferred the latter.
- 542458 5y ago
  “Business reasons” and “convenience for end users” are not entirely decoupled because developer time is not infinite or free. As an end user, the app that exists on my platform (Figma on windows) is better than the app that never got ported because it’s codebase is tied into a bunch of OS native stuff (Sketch). If an app costs half as much because it’s easier to hire developers who know JS compared to native devs, I’ll also be happy. If an app gets features added faster, or is less buggy, or has a better plugin interface, hey, I won’t complain. There’s nothing that says “as an end user I’ll always prefer electron” - I don’t care what it’s written in. But from my perspective there seems to be a lot of high quality electron software that may not have existed otherwise.
- fauigerzigerk 5y ago
  >We ended here for pure business reasons, and not as a convenience for end users. But it's users who are creating these business reasons. Many people, myself included, simply don't experience native software as universally superior as platform purists would have it. So we're not paying for it. And no you can't simply blame employers either. They may not care much about what their employees find more convenient or more beautiful, but they sure care about productivity and TCO. Resource constraints are not a capitalist conspiracy. Free software suffers from the same issues and trade-offs between implementing actual features and re-writing software for six different platforms and UI technologies. A choice free of any and all resource constraints cannot exist.
- jmrm 5y ago
  Also we have to consider that porting software or trying to make it work with the same characteristics and UI is pretty difficult and expensive (in time and money) compared with a web app or an Electron application.
murukesh_s 5y ago
You forgot the elephant - vscode - built on chrome (electron) and now used by majority of devs. Also folks who want js go away web sites dont realize how massive the ecosystem is. How many unicorns are SaaS vs Native? You are asking them to go out of business?

viktorcode 5y ago

We ended here for pure business reasons, and not as a convenience for end users. JavaScript programmers are dime a dozen comparing to Cocoa programmers. What we ended up with is suite of software almost no one uses on their free choice.

tolmasky 5y ago
The business decision Apple made to largely ignore Cocoa, especially any semblance of documentation, and then confuse “native developers” by giving them conflicting half-baked solutions like Catalyst and SwiftUI? I guess given the option between a closed-source half-assed framework like Catalyst that even Apple themselves can’t make reasonable apps with (see Apple News), and an open source half-assed framework like Electron where you can at least contribute a fix instead of having to wait a full year for the surprise of whether your reported issue got fixed or not, most people just preferred the latter.
542458 5y ago
“Business reasons” and “convenience for end users” are not entirely decoupled because developer time is not infinite or free. As an end user, the app that exists on my platform (Figma on windows) is better than the app that never got ported because it’s codebase is tied into a bunch of OS native stuff (Sketch). If an app costs half as much because it’s easier to hire developers who know JS compared to native devs, I’ll also be happy. If an app gets features added faster, or is less buggy, or has a better plugin interface, hey, I won’t complain. There’s nothing that says “as an end user I’ll always prefer electron” - I don’t care what it’s written in. But from my perspective there seems to be a lot of high quality electron software that may not have existed otherwise.
fauigerzigerk 5y ago
>We ended here for pure business reasons, and not as a convenience for end users. But it's users who are creating these business reasons. Many people, myself included, simply don't experience native software as universally superior as platform purists would have it. So we're not paying for it. And no you can't simply blame employers either. They may not care much about what their employees find more convenient or more beautiful, but they sure care about productivity and TCO. Resource constraints are not a capitalist conspiracy. Free software suffers from the same issues and trade-offs between implementing actual features and re-writing software for six different platforms and UI technologies. A choice free of any and all resource constraints cannot exist.
jmrm 5y ago
Also we have to consider that porting software or trying to make it work with the same characteristics and UI is pretty difficult and expensive (in time and money) compared with a web app or an Electron application.

murukesh_s 5y ago

You forgot the elephant - vscode - built on chrome (electron) and now used by majority of devs. Also folks who want js go away web sites dont realize how massive the ecosystem is. How many unicorns are SaaS vs Native? You are asking them to go out of business?