5 ms·
We can kind of see how this happened. There are multiple platforms and nobody wants to write a separate app for each one. So now you need a framework to make a
by zrm 5y ago
We can kind of see how this happened.
There are multiple platforms and nobody wants to write a separate app for each one. So now you need a framework to make apps multi-platform.
Microsoft has resources but no incentive to do this. They have the most market share. Before Electron existed, people would just write native apps for Windows and nothing else, locking people into Microsoft.
Apple has resources, they have the right incentive because they don't have dominant market share on desktop, but they're obsessed with native look and feel. Cross platform frameworks are antithetical to that, so they don't do it.
That leaves the Linux people. So we get Qt. Finally something that works. Except that this is the opposite of what the Linux people are good at. It's not "do one thing do it well," it's reimplementing the equivalent of an entire operating system's APIs on at least three different operating systems. That's a lot of work, it's hard to do right and easy to get wrong, and they don't have a mountain of cash behind them. So it works but it's full of sharp edges.
Enter Electron. Browsers had to deal with the same multi-platform nonsense but Google does have a mountain of cash so it's easier to use. Winner, efficiency be damned.
What might have worked if anybody there thought of it would be for Apple to port their native APIs to Windows (because it has the most market share) and Linux (because it's a fellow Unix-like so that should be pretty easy). Then you could easily compile native macOS applications for other platforms but they would still be native on macOS. That solves their problem because now everybody is going to target their native API, and if they run less well on Windows, that's fine as long as they run at least as well as Electron does. Big win for them because now that becomes the target and they're the only ones with true native applications.
But is modern Apple smart enough to do that?
- 5sp 5y agonot with Steve's dead.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago>Microsoft has resources but no incentive to do this. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/what-is-maui https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui/what-is-maui
- martneumann 5y agoFrom my experience, these Microsoft frameworks never really get picked up by larger parts of the community. I feel like Microsoft's approach is to create a framework for everything and hope it sticks - though they appear to repeatedly fail. Nobody really used Xamarin. Nobody is using Blazor. This very minimal documentation of Maui doesn't really scream confidence in their own product, either. I predict this one will die as well.
- dachryn 5y agoThis so much. Google gets a lot of critique for killing of its products, but Microsoft does the same in the developer community. Except they don't even have the decency to properly announce it when they consider something abandonware
- tester34 5y ago>Nobody is using Blazor. Hmm, I don't think this is true. Also this is kind of different beast - WASM has some limitations that need to be overcome
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]