6 ms·

> most people can't tell Hard disagree. I'd take the sibling comment about enterprise users getting used to poor UX and take that a step further: most users a

> most people can't tell Hard disagree. I'd take the sibling comment about enterprise users getting used to poor UX and take that a step further: most users anywhere expect poor UX and expect to be ignored. Take the Github UI refresh (yes it's not an "app", but hear me out). They've literally reinvented the text display widget in the browser. One of the core things that a browser does and Github reinvented it. Public feedback has often been quite harsh. After a long public beta, it still choked on multibyte characters, it's laggy, it doesn't respond to keystrokes the way a native app (or even the browser itself) does, sometimes it displays spurious characters, and in some cases creates blurry text. Users have had to point out how to deal with multibyte characters Javascript, someone recently complained of excessive eye strain because text is so blurry. What has Github done in the face of that feedback? They've doubled down on their custom widget and largely ignored the reported issues. > For that kind of developer experience to consumer satisfaction Again I strongly doubt you're getting an accurate measure of customer satisfaction if you think folks don't notice non-native apps. Earlier today I was actually trying to think of larger mac-native apps released by not-Apple and couldn't think of anything. The closest I could think of was Fusion 360 and that uses Qt. As much as I notice how janky VSCode and Signal are, I'm not going to bother providing feedback that Electron sticks out like a sore thumb. With Fusion, the only feedback Autodesk ever responded to was the whole "hey you're pointing customers at staging resources" thing. It's a bit of sunk cost fallacy and a bit of "good enough". By and large once a company has picked a tech stack they're not going to move away from it without some serious motivation.

satvikpendem 3y ago
HN, GitHub and other such sites heavily skew towards developers who can tell, yes. I am talking about the vast majority of people who, I guarantee you, would not be able to tell a native component from a non-native one. The teams I have been on have done user testing for precisely this, comparing native vs cross platform frameworks as we were evaluating whether to use them or not. Literally 99% of the people we talked to did not notice or care, which actually falls in line quite nicely to how much of the US population are software engineers, ~1%. If you doubt my results, talk to your non-technical friends and show them apps that are native vs those that aren't and hear what they say.
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  Literally 99% of the people we talked to did not notice or care Or they've decided there are better things to do than try to convince someone who's got a vested interest in defending their current tech stack. The text rendering problems with e.g. Github are something even a blind person could see – yet you're dismissing them as highly arcane things that only a developer would notice. Actually, a blind person would also likely notice your non-native app because it almost certainly doesn't integrate well (if at all) with operating system accessibility features.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    We didn't have a "vested interest" in any tech stack, this was all preliminary testing before we built out anything. If you want to take any evidence of what people empirically care about as being somehow a bias or flaw in testing methodology on our part, then do your own user testing and likely come to the same conclusions as us. You've reduced the problem from something apparently everyone can readily see to now the blind (again, blind who? Blind developers). Accessibility is important which is why every cross platform framework of note has accessibility solutions, the web is not the only user interface that implements accessibility. This says nothing about how much people who are able-bodied care, which, again, is the vast majority of people who simply do not care. Just because one observes some problem to exist does not mean that everyone else feels the same, however much one would like to be vindicated of their experience of the problem.
    - inferiorhuman 3y ago
      You've reduced the problem from something apparently everyone can readily see And you've dismissed this as something only a developer would notice: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1002257/248511013-989438c8-92e1-4888-b3bc-556192726429.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1002257/248511013-... https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/440661/246317472-af1d648b-60db-4e08-b807-908aafd7c69e.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/440661/246317472-a... https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/128169473/239261154-ee660182-ba86-4ce7-bfd8-5d87378d17f8.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/128169473/23926115... You're greatly overestimating how willing people are to take the effort to complain. At the end of the day non-native toolkits have lowered folks expectations to the point that (save for the occasional "why are computers so fast and apps so slow" comments) they're quite likely to accept a low quality app. If you've got 99% of any group agreeing on anything subjective there's a problem with your measurement.

satvikpendem 3y ago

HN, GitHub and other such sites heavily skew towards developers who can tell, yes. I am talking about the vast majority of people who, I guarantee you, would not be able to tell a native component from a non-native one. The teams I have been on have done user testing for precisely this, comparing native vs cross platform frameworks as we were evaluating whether to use them or not. Literally 99% of the people we talked to did not notice or care, which actually falls in line quite nicely to how much of the US population are software engineers, ~1%. If you doubt my results, talk to your non-technical friends and show them apps that are native vs those that aren't and hear what they say.

inferiorhuman 3y ago
Literally 99% of the people we talked to did not notice or care Or they've decided there are better things to do than try to convince someone who's got a vested interest in defending their current tech stack. The text rendering problems with e.g. Github are something even a blind person could see – yet you're dismissing them as highly arcane things that only a developer would notice. Actually, a blind person would also likely notice your non-native app because it almost certainly doesn't integrate well (if at all) with operating system accessibility features.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  We didn't have a "vested interest" in any tech stack, this was all preliminary testing before we built out anything. If you want to take any evidence of what people empirically care about as being somehow a bias or flaw in testing methodology on our part, then do your own user testing and likely come to the same conclusions as us. You've reduced the problem from something apparently everyone can readily see to now the blind (again, blind who? Blind developers). Accessibility is important which is why every cross platform framework of note has accessibility solutions, the web is not the only user interface that implements accessibility. This says nothing about how much people who are able-bodied care, which, again, is the vast majority of people who simply do not care. Just because one observes some problem to exist does not mean that everyone else feels the same, however much one would like to be vindicated of their experience of the problem.
  - inferiorhuman 3y ago
    You've reduced the problem from something apparently everyone can readily see And you've dismissed this as something only a developer would notice: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1002257/248511013-989438c8-92e1-4888-b3bc-556192726429.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1002257/248511013-... https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/440661/246317472-af1d648b-60db-4e08-b807-908aafd7c69e.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/440661/246317472-a... https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/128169473/239261154-ee660182-ba86-4ce7-bfd8-5d87378d17f8.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/128169473/23926115... You're greatly overestimating how willing people are to take the effort to complain. At the end of the day non-native toolkits have lowered folks expectations to the point that (save for the occasional "why are computers so fast and apps so slow" comments) they're quite likely to accept a low quality app. If you've got 99% of any group agreeing on anything subjective there's a problem with your measurement.