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I disagree with the author. I see it as, if not for Electron, this app wouldn't have been made for Mac period or it would not have feature parity or it would b

I disagree with the author. I see it as, if not for Electron, this app wouldn't have been made for Mac period or it would not have feature parity or it would be more expensive in terms of subscription or one-time buy price. Choose 2 out of 3: Low price, feature parity, app performance. For certain types of apps, consumers have chosen low price and feature parity. I think it's fine for apps like Spotify, Whatsapp, Discord, Teams, etc to use Electron. They're cross platform apps that also require a web version. Electron provides acceptable performance for them. VSCode is the prime example of having huge success with Electron. It's free. It supports many platforms. It has feature and plugin parity. It even allows very interesting use cases like spinning up private web instances that have all your local settings. Obviously there are types of apps such as video editing and rendering that should not be Electron apps - and they aren't.

Secretmapper 3y ago
I agree with this take. Most of the 'good' app listed (and also the ones I love) like Transmit, iTerm etc are mac _exclusive_. They only target Mac. It doesn't make any sense to do that to Discord because it's cross platform by necessity and design.
- saintfire 3y ago
  The exclusive apps are other side of the coin, even. They show that making something that targets Mac is its own job if you're not using cross platform frameworks. With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that people don't want to target Mac, especially if they're not entrenched in or familiar with the Apple ecosystem.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I wonder what the best example of a cross-platform app that uses the native toolkits on the various platforms is. I’m going to discount/ignore things like browsers.
    - imbnwa 3y ago
      Which toolkit do you use on Windows
mmcnl 3y ago
Indeed Electron apps are not competing with native apps, they are competing with not existing at all, especially for macOS and Linux because of their relatively low market share.
- viraptor 3y ago
  That argument would hold more power if there wasn't an existing native client for Slack and Discord, made by one person, with all the features I needed, working with absolutely no lag and minimal resource use, working on MacOS, Linux and Windows. Unfortunately the development stopped, or I'd still use it. https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ There's absolutely nothing preventing a large, funded company from achieving the same on the tech level.
  - aurareturn 3y ago
    That argument would hold more power if there wasn't an existing native client for Slack and Discord, made by one person, with all the features I needed, working with absolutely no lag and minimal resource use, working on MacOS, Linux and Windows. Did this 3rd party app have 100% feature parity with the original Discord/Slack app the moment new features came out? If not, what was the time delta between the two? Why didn't the author continue development? It seems like it was on sale for $20? Surely because people value native app so much that he would have made more than enough money to continue development?
    - viraptor 3y ago
      Can't speak for the author. I haven't seen the reasoning. The awareness of the app wasn't that great though. I only found out it existed right as Slack changed the organisation token/auth which never got fully implemented in Ripcord. There was only one post that got lots of attention on HN and that was before the pandemic. (With a pretty good reception, mostly around being light/not-electron https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19617699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19617699) Can't speak to the feature compatibility completely, but testing it over a week or so I've not found anything missing at the time. I think the video calls got added after the development stopped and that never arrived. Then Discord started banning third party / differently behaving clients, so that part got dangerous.
bmicraft 3y ago
> I think it's fine for apps like Spotify [...] to use Electron Spotify uses a significant amount of power/battery while playing music when my laptop is otherwise idle. I can only image that being due to decrypting their drm'd music in javascript. Many people won't notice and therefore not care, but I do think it's quite the drawback. Much more than the ui not looking native or not perfectly integrating into my desktop. Even running through wine would be preferable to that.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Would running through Wine really provide that much of a difference in resource consumption?
  - bmicraft 3y ago
    Wine has almost no overhead, which means a native windows app should be much faster than an equally optimized electron app.
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      Interesting, because I find that running software like MyLifeOrganized in Wine to be fairly cumbersome versus running it natively.
- jemmyw 3y ago
  Electron (node) can call into C libs in a couple of different ways in order to do things like decrypt the music. I really doubt that work is being done in the javascript layer. I've not had an issue with Spotify for some time, I generally like the app other than the odd nitpick here and there. I haven't encountered bugs for a long time, not ones that stop me using it. Apple Music on the other hand... a native app that, being written by Apple themselves, should be the epitome of how to do it in terms of quality and user experience, is terrible! It feels laggy. I just opened it and clicking between sections there's like a noticable tiny lag in the highlight under the list items where spotify feels immediate. AM looks pretty sparse. But far worse than those things, it often breaks and is unusable. "There was a problem accessing your account" restart and it works. When I first signed up to it I had to contact Apple support because the app just wouldn't work. I guess at least they had a support channel where I could chat with someone. The app quality is appalling though.

Secretmapper 3y ago

I agree with this take. Most of the 'good' app listed (and also the ones I love) like Transmit, iTerm etc are mac _exclusive_. They only target Mac. It doesn't make any sense to do that to Discord because it's cross platform by necessity and design.

saintfire 3y ago
The exclusive apps are other side of the coin, even. They show that making something that targets Mac is its own job if you're not using cross platform frameworks. With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that people don't want to target Mac, especially if they're not entrenched in or familiar with the Apple ecosystem.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I wonder what the best example of a cross-platform app that uses the native toolkits on the various platforms is. I’m going to discount/ignore things like browsers.
  - imbnwa 3y ago
    Which toolkit do you use on Windows

mmcnl 3y ago

Indeed Electron apps are not competing with native apps, they are competing with not existing at all, especially for macOS and Linux because of their relatively low market share.

viraptor 3y ago
That argument would hold more power if there wasn't an existing native client for Slack and Discord, made by one person, with all the features I needed, working with absolutely no lag and minimal resource use, working on MacOS, Linux and Windows. Unfortunately the development stopped, or I'd still use it. https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ There's absolutely nothing preventing a large, funded company from achieving the same on the tech level.
- aurareturn 3y ago
  That argument would hold more power if there wasn't an existing native client for Slack and Discord, made by one person, with all the features I needed, working with absolutely no lag and minimal resource use, working on MacOS, Linux and Windows. Did this 3rd party app have 100% feature parity with the original Discord/Slack app the moment new features came out? If not, what was the time delta between the two? Why didn't the author continue development? It seems like it was on sale for $20? Surely because people value native app so much that he would have made more than enough money to continue development?
  - viraptor 3y ago
    Can't speak for the author. I haven't seen the reasoning. The awareness of the app wasn't that great though. I only found out it existed right as Slack changed the organisation token/auth which never got fully implemented in Ripcord. There was only one post that got lots of attention on HN and that was before the pandemic. (With a pretty good reception, mostly around being light/not-electron https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19617699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19617699) Can't speak to the feature compatibility completely, but testing it over a week or so I've not found anything missing at the time. I think the video calls got added after the development stopped and that never arrived. Then Discord started banning third party / differently behaving clients, so that part got dangerous.

bmicraft 3y ago

> I think it's fine for apps like Spotify [...] to use Electron Spotify uses a significant amount of power/battery while playing music when my laptop is otherwise idle. I can only image that being due to decrypting their drm'd music in javascript. Many people won't notice and therefore not care, but I do think it's quite the drawback. Much more than the ui not looking native or not perfectly integrating into my desktop. Even running through wine would be preferable to that.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
Would running through Wine really provide that much of a difference in resource consumption?
- bmicraft 3y ago
  Wine has almost no overhead, which means a native windows app should be much faster than an equally optimized electron app.
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    Interesting, because I find that running software like MyLifeOrganized in Wine to be fairly cumbersome versus running it natively.
jemmyw 3y ago
Electron (node) can call into C libs in a couple of different ways in order to do things like decrypt the music. I really doubt that work is being done in the javascript layer. I've not had an issue with Spotify for some time, I generally like the app other than the odd nitpick here and there. I haven't encountered bugs for a long time, not ones that stop me using it. Apple Music on the other hand... a native app that, being written by Apple themselves, should be the epitome of how to do it in terms of quality and user experience, is terrible! It feels laggy. I just opened it and clicking between sections there's like a noticable tiny lag in the highlight under the list items where spotify feels immediate. AM looks pretty sparse. But far worse than those things, it often breaks and is unusable. "There was a problem accessing your account" restart and it works. When I first signed up to it I had to contact Apple support because the app just wouldn't work. I guess at least they had a support channel where I could chat with someone. The app quality is appalling though.