7 ms·

> I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to have an absolute opinion on the goodness or badness of these tools

by kelnos 28d ago

> I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to have an absolute opinion on the goodness or badness of these tools. I don't think that's necessarily true. Nuance is a thing. These tools are bad, objectively! They give inferior user experiences, and waste resources (ever more important now with RAM prices what they are). But that doesn't mean I can't understand or even agree with a company for using them. Building the same native application for more than one platform is expensive and time-consuming. Most of the time I'm happy to prefer an app built with a cross-platform framework vs. not having one at all. (To be fair, though, if there's a webapp, 90% of the time I'll prefer that over an Electron app. But nothing meets a well-built native app.)

danisth 28d ago
I think you contradicted yourself. If a tool provides better value for the time spent for a company, I don’t understand how you can call it objectively bad. You can say it’s objectively bad from a technical perspective, but clearly that’s only one part of the equation.
- ToucanLoucan 28d ago
  It's objectively bad because of how hot my phone is. It's subjectively bad because it's an embarrassment. Like you're seriously going to tell me something like Discord, worth 15 BILLION, cannot afford native apps? Spare me.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 28d ago
    What really grinds my gears is Microsoft replacing native apps with Electron. Trillion dollar company who is so cash strapped they have no choice but to punt to the easy development path.
    - ToucanLoucan 28d ago
      What's extra egregious there is I do understand the logic because developing for Windows is such a fucking nightmare, that they're also responsible for.
      - xp84 28d ago
        I assure you, developing for competing platforms is also a fucking nightmare... that's something Microsoft has no monopoly on!
        oskxekxmekdj 28d ago
        And I assure you, developing for Mac is a delight, and Linux is not so bad either. Windows, however, fucking disgrace.
        ToucanLoucan 27d ago
        As an iOS dev who then got Mac development effectively for free in the bargain, fucking this. Xcode is not perfect, far from it, but it is still head, shoulders, cock and balls above every other toolset I've ever used, bar none. And while the IDE itself is like, mid, you simply can't beat the ease of use. Someone who has never built software for iOS or MacOS can fire up Xcode and have something running probably within an hour that does interesting stuff.
        pezo1919 25d ago
        Do you have experience with Jetbrains products? If yes, wdyt where are they lacking and how XCode is better? For me Jetbrains is miles ahead of XCode.
    - cosmic_cheese 28d ago
      The thing that makes Microsoft's case particularly annoying is that they have demonstrated how they can develop half-decent Electron apps with VS Code, but have simply elected not to with anything that's not VS Code. Like yes, I'd prefer native and MS can certainly afford to take that path, but they can't even be bothered to make sure that most of their Electron apps land on the upper half of the quality spectrum.
      - skydhash 28d ago
        > they can develop half-decent Electron apps with VS Code, Only if you don't compare it with any native or quasi native editors like Notepad++ or Sublime text. And Emacs has been cross-platform for decades.
        ToucanLoucan 28d ago
        Also they bloated it to death. VSCodium gets you the same solid core app without the oodles and oodles of useless "features" Microsoft has bolted to it.
    - xp84 28d ago
      Yikes. What apps have they been doing this with?
      - 0cf8612b2e1e 28d ago
        Turns out I was mistaken. Outlook was rewritten for Webview, not Electron. So still took a native application and turned it into web nonsense, but I got the specifics wrong. Regardless, there are a bunch of new visual glitches in the release, with regressed performance all over the place.
        xp84 27d ago
        Having just switched from Google Workspace + Mac to all-Microsoft + Windows, it's been so difficult adjusting. I can choose between two desktop versions of Outlook or the Web, and I just use the Web because it's the least weird and somehow faster than the new desktop app (which is just the PWA one anyway). But I still have to open a modal just because I dragged a meeting from one time to another. This version of Outlook is, slowly, getting better though.
- 1123581321 28d ago
  I'm not the OP, but my understanding (and I agree) is that it can seem like a better value when a subset of factors are considered (ones that IT can measure, biases in IT against Apple etc.) and it leads the company into making a choice that is worse for them overall.
- shiflett 28d ago
  I think they were speaking as a user. These tools create inferior products. (Still not technically objective, but true nonetheless.) That doesn't mean companies should necessarily avoid them. As a user, I always want the best possible user experience, but a company can't prioritize that above all else, and I know that.
  - wredcoll 28d ago
    I am so tired of existing react/electron applications being compared against imaginary, hypothetical "native" applications. Like, it's fine to criticize something, "this component doesn't follow the OS's UI guidelines" or "this scrollbar disappears when the mouse isn't over it which is a bad UX" or whatever, but this generic "oh this is bad but if it was rewritten it would be perfect" is annoying.
    - pessimizer 28d ago
      It's always the preference of people defending bad decisions to compare them to doing nothing. What you're seeing is people actually making that case instead of forcing it. They're saying that if the app wouldn't exist without this bad thing, then it is appropriate to compare using the bad thing to doing nothing. You just seem to be demanding that people not mention other ways to do things, or you'll get angry.
      - joefourier 28d ago
        The app not existing would unironically be better in so many instances, though. The web version doesn’t take up 1GB of disk space, install persistent services, send you push notifications by default, and it’s trivial to block ads in comparison. I’d be very happy if companies didn’t artificially degrade their web version to force installation of an “app” that’s effectively a web browser in disguise.
        xp84 28d ago
        Hard agree. Day by day, I become more exhausted with "apps" as they are currently delivered, with native being slightly better than cross-plaform, but not good. Apps in 2026 deliver all the disadvantages of a plain ol' website (Requires an always-on WAN to have any function whatsoever, UI that doesn't meld with the OS in any way, no integration with things like Shortcuts...) but add huge real costs: Extra time before I can start using it, the hogging of easily 500-1000MB of disk space on day 1, a growing un-clearable cache, sluggish transitions with useless animations, and the need to be "updated" on a regular basis (whether used or not) wasting my time and bandwidth. One of the few benefits to me as the user of a 'client application' has always been that a well-made app uses an API to speak to the server which is dramatically lower bandwidth than the modern BloatWeb with AdTech™ stack could ever match, which ought to enable the highest performance. But it seems like they rarely actually deliver that benefit.
echelon 28d ago
None of this matters anymore. We have LLMs. It's easy to build native everything now without much resource expenditure. Android will be Kotlin. iOS will be Swift. Desktop and server will be Rust. Web will be TypeScript / React for now, but maybe one day WASM. LLMs are the target now.
- suriyaG 28d ago
  not sure why you're getting downvoted. but if you're building even very popular applications, it is quite easy to see how LLMs are very well suited for this type of consistency job. - they follow instructions quite well. - are tireless at doing mechanical ports between languages and frameworks. - Can understand a new ecosystem quite well.
  - collingreen 28d ago
    I didn't downvote but I'd expect downvotes for a completely unnuanced thought terminating cliche that ignores everything in the thread. AI fanaticism doesn't help but lots of people don't get downvoted for that alone.
  - nemomarx 28d ago
    Then why aren't people doing that? Microsoft has as much access to cheap tokens as any software company around, right, so you'd think they would be leading the way.
    - suriyaG 28d ago
      I'm sure these things are in the plans from upper management. we'll know when the next layoffs hit.
    - chasd00 28d ago
      they probably are but have some patience. Keep in mind, claudecode and the other coding agents were pretty bad until around Jan of this year (2026). So it's only been about 9 months since devs have had decent coding agents and even less time has elapsed since somewhat wide adoption.
sfn42 28d ago
I don't have any actual experience with React Native and Electron, but with that caveat out of the way I personally think tools get far too much blame that should be on developers. For an example that I actually have experience with, React very frequently gets criticized for being slow, heavy etc. React is not slow. I can make (have made) fast and snappy websites in react. React can render at more than 60fps if necessary, and if the code isn't shit. The fact that someone else has made a slow buggy mess with React does not prove that react is bad, it simply proves that the developers are bad. At this point, someone will typically interject with something along the lines of "but react makes it hard to make fast websites" and to that I simply say no it doesn't. I've seen what makes react apps slow, and it's generally just bad code. The developers who make shitty react apps would make equally shitty apps with any tool because they're the problem not the tool. They don't know how to build good software and literally no tool can help them because it's simply a matter of understanding programming and the sad fact is most developers suck at programming. I graduated university with about 200 others and out of those people who have the same degree as I do, very few were even decent at programming. I know that because I was the guy who helped them complete their assignments and I was a TA in several different classes, and I'm telling you the overwhelming majority of students sucked at programming even after 2-3 years of studying it. After graduating I've worked on many different web apps and other stuff, and I've seen an overwhelming trend of trash code and bad developers. The people who actually care about writing good software and have the mental facilities to do so are few and far between. And that's why most software sucks. A good developer can write good software using pretty much any of the popular tools. The tools are just different ways to do the same stuff. Sure there's some overhead with react etc but it's really not that significant, the significant part is all the trash code people put on top of it.
- bushbaba 28d ago
  Most enterprises are comprised of a high proportion of shit developers. So you need to work with what you got
- Shitty-kitty 28d ago
  A shitty developer can create a far worst experience on react then on native.
hylaride 28d ago
Nuance is always a thing. Native apps are faster and better most of the time. Electron and React Native wouldn't annoy me so much if they were used with small apps where it's not worth over-optimizing. However, it's now the default for Multiplatform apps that are used constantly, including IDEs, chat apps, etc. They gobble up memory and cpu cycles and are constantly getting updates due to the shitshow that is the javascript dependancy ecosystem.
- ojr 28d ago
  React Native apps make more revenue than Flutter and Native apps according to Revenue Cat report published on June 3rd, 2026. https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/engineering/why-react-native-apps-make-more-money https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/engineering/why-react-native...
  - WA 27d ago
    Thanks, but from the same article: "First key learning: execution matters far more than stack choice" which directly translates to: make a great app and nobody cares about the tech and this includes whether or not to use Liquid Glass.
    - ojr 23d ago
      I agree the tech doesn't matter but React Native helps with the deeply layered problem of execution.
- Capricorn2481 28d ago
  I would rather have the opposite? I don't want 10 people making small apps that use Electron. I would rather that be used for bigger apps where the overhead is negligible.
kevin_thibedeau 28d ago
A well built native app can still serve as a vector for harvesting personal data in ways you cannot control. A web app is inherently superior because of its security envelope.
- jkubicek 28d ago
  A React Native app would have all the same access to your personal data that a native app would
  - kevin_thibedeau 28d ago
    That isn't a web app.
JeremyNT 28d ago
> These tools are bad, objectively! They give inferior user experiences, and waste resources (ever more important now with RAM prices what they are). They can be "bad" in some dimensions (as you mentioned) while being "good" in others (dev productivity). These frameworks didn't become popular for no reason. They have value. The parts that are "good" can easily outweigh the parts that are "objectively bad" when they enable a smaller team to get things out the door they would have had trouble shipping otherwise.
jwlake 28d ago
A badly made native app is worse than a well built react-native app. There are plenty of anti-patterns that will ruin your native app. In stories like this its much more likely that they just got sick of refactoring a big ugly code base so got buy in to throw it all away and starting over and the justification is native. Wait like 5 years and there will be a new react-native corss platform app because the native apps have too much cruft. Assuming we still have human in the loop then.
- kentm 28d ago
  > A badly made native app is worse than a well built react-native app. There are plenty of anti-patterns that will ruin your native app. Sure, but thats not an interesting observation unless there is something about react-native that makes those apps consistently higher quality than native apps. On the other hand, like-for-like C/C++/Rust performs better than javascript in terms of CPU and memory use, so the null hypothesis is that re-implementing would , in fact, improve things. There's little reason to think a priori that the end result would somehow be worse.
- robertoandred 28d ago
  I think they also got sick of supporting those open source libraries.

by kelnos 28d ago

danisth 28d ago

I think you contradicted yourself. If a tool provides better value for the time spent for a company, I don’t understand how you can call it objectively bad. You can say it’s objectively bad from a technical perspective, but clearly that’s only one part of the equation.

ToucanLoucan 28d ago
It's objectively bad because of how hot my phone is. It's subjectively bad because it's an embarrassment. Like you're seriously going to tell me something like Discord, worth 15 BILLION, cannot afford native apps? Spare me.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 28d ago
  What really grinds my gears is Microsoft replacing native apps with Electron. Trillion dollar company who is so cash strapped they have no choice but to punt to the easy development path.
  - ToucanLoucan 28d ago
    What's extra egregious there is I do understand the logic because developing for Windows is such a fucking nightmare, that they're also responsible for.
    - xp84 28d ago
      I assure you, developing for competing platforms is also a fucking nightmare... that's something Microsoft has no monopoly on!
      - oskxekxmekdj 28d ago
        And I assure you, developing for Mac is a delight, and Linux is not so bad either. Windows, however, fucking disgrace.
        ToucanLoucan 27d ago
        As an iOS dev who then got Mac development effectively for free in the bargain, fucking this. Xcode is not perfect, far from it, but it is still head, shoulders, cock and balls above every other toolset I've ever used, bar none. And while the IDE itself is like, mid, you simply can't beat the ease of use. Someone who has never built software for iOS or MacOS can fire up Xcode and have something running probably within an hour that does interesting stuff.
        pezo1919 25d ago
        Do you have experience with Jetbrains products? If yes, wdyt where are they lacking and how XCode is better? For me Jetbrains is miles ahead of XCode.
  - cosmic_cheese 28d ago
    The thing that makes Microsoft's case particularly annoying is that they have demonstrated how they can develop half-decent Electron apps with VS Code, but have simply elected not to with anything that's not VS Code. Like yes, I'd prefer native and MS can certainly afford to take that path, but they can't even be bothered to make sure that most of their Electron apps land on the upper half of the quality spectrum.
    - skydhash 28d ago
      > they can develop half-decent Electron apps with VS Code, Only if you don't compare it with any native or quasi native editors like Notepad++ or Sublime text. And Emacs has been cross-platform for decades.
      - ToucanLoucan 28d ago
        Also they bloated it to death. VSCodium gets you the same solid core app without the oodles and oodles of useless "features" Microsoft has bolted to it.
  - xp84 28d ago
    Yikes. What apps have they been doing this with?
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 28d ago
      Turns out I was mistaken. Outlook was rewritten for Webview, not Electron. So still took a native application and turned it into web nonsense, but I got the specifics wrong. Regardless, there are a bunch of new visual glitches in the release, with regressed performance all over the place.
      - xp84 27d ago
        Having just switched from Google Workspace + Mac to all-Microsoft + Windows, it's been so difficult adjusting. I can choose between two desktop versions of Outlook or the Web, and I just use the Web because it's the least weird and somehow faster than the new desktop app (which is just the PWA one anyway). But I still have to open a modal just because I dragged a meeting from one time to another. This version of Outlook is, slowly, getting better though.
1123581321 28d ago
I'm not the OP, but my understanding (and I agree) is that it can seem like a better value when a subset of factors are considered (ones that IT can measure, biases in IT against Apple etc.) and it leads the company into making a choice that is worse for them overall.
shiflett 28d ago
I think they were speaking as a user. These tools create inferior products. (Still not technically objective, but true nonetheless.) That doesn't mean companies should necessarily avoid them. As a user, I always want the best possible user experience, but a company can't prioritize that above all else, and I know that.
- wredcoll 28d ago
  I am so tired of existing react/electron applications being compared against imaginary, hypothetical "native" applications. Like, it's fine to criticize something, "this component doesn't follow the OS's UI guidelines" or "this scrollbar disappears when the mouse isn't over it which is a bad UX" or whatever, but this generic "oh this is bad but if it was rewritten it would be perfect" is annoying.
  - pessimizer 28d ago
    It's always the preference of people defending bad decisions to compare them to doing nothing. What you're seeing is people actually making that case instead of forcing it. They're saying that if the app wouldn't exist without this bad thing, then it is appropriate to compare using the bad thing to doing nothing. You just seem to be demanding that people not mention other ways to do things, or you'll get angry.
    - joefourier 28d ago
      The app not existing would unironically be better in so many instances, though. The web version doesn’t take up 1GB of disk space, install persistent services, send you push notifications by default, and it’s trivial to block ads in comparison. I’d be very happy if companies didn’t artificially degrade their web version to force installation of an “app” that’s effectively a web browser in disguise.
      - xp84 28d ago
        Hard agree. Day by day, I become more exhausted with "apps" as they are currently delivered, with native being slightly better than cross-plaform, but not good. Apps in 2026 deliver all the disadvantages of a plain ol' website (Requires an always-on WAN to have any function whatsoever, UI that doesn't meld with the OS in any way, no integration with things like Shortcuts...) but add huge real costs: Extra time before I can start using it, the hogging of easily 500-1000MB of disk space on day 1, a growing un-clearable cache, sluggish transitions with useless animations, and the need to be "updated" on a regular basis (whether used or not) wasting my time and bandwidth. One of the few benefits to me as the user of a 'client application' has always been that a well-made app uses an API to speak to the server which is dramatically lower bandwidth than the modern BloatWeb with AdTech™ stack could ever match, which ought to enable the highest performance. But it seems like they rarely actually deliver that benefit.

echelon 28d ago

None of this matters anymore. We have LLMs. It's easy to build native everything now without much resource expenditure. Android will be Kotlin. iOS will be Swift. Desktop and server will be Rust. Web will be TypeScript / React for now, but maybe one day WASM. LLMs are the target now.

suriyaG 28d ago
not sure why you're getting downvoted. but if you're building even very popular applications, it is quite easy to see how LLMs are very well suited for this type of consistency job. - they follow instructions quite well. - are tireless at doing mechanical ports between languages and frameworks. - Can understand a new ecosystem quite well.
- collingreen 28d ago
  I didn't downvote but I'd expect downvotes for a completely unnuanced thought terminating cliche that ignores everything in the thread. AI fanaticism doesn't help but lots of people don't get downvoted for that alone.
- nemomarx 28d ago
  Then why aren't people doing that? Microsoft has as much access to cheap tokens as any software company around, right, so you'd think they would be leading the way.
  - suriyaG 28d ago
    I'm sure these things are in the plans from upper management. we'll know when the next layoffs hit.
  - chasd00 28d ago
    they probably are but have some patience. Keep in mind, claudecode and the other coding agents were pretty bad until around Jan of this year (2026). So it's only been about 9 months since devs have had decent coding agents and even less time has elapsed since somewhat wide adoption.

sfn42 28d ago

I don't have any actual experience with React Native and Electron, but with that caveat out of the way I personally think tools get far too much blame that should be on developers. For an example that I actually have experience with, React very frequently gets criticized for being slow, heavy etc. React is not slow. I can make (have made) fast and snappy websites in react. React can render at more than 60fps if necessary, and if the code isn't shit. The fact that someone else has made a slow buggy mess with React does not prove that react is bad, it simply proves that the developers are bad. At this point, someone will typically interject with something along the lines of "but react makes it hard to make fast websites" and to that I simply say no it doesn't. I've seen what makes react apps slow, and it's generally just bad code. The developers who make shitty react apps would make equally shitty apps with any tool because they're the problem not the tool. They don't know how to build good software and literally no tool can help them because it's simply a matter of understanding programming and the sad fact is most developers suck at programming. I graduated university with about 200 others and out of those people who have the same degree as I do, very few were even decent at programming. I know that because I was the guy who helped them complete their assignments and I was a TA in several different classes, and I'm telling you the overwhelming majority of students sucked at programming even after 2-3 years of studying it. After graduating I've worked on many different web apps and other stuff, and I've seen an overwhelming trend of trash code and bad developers. The people who actually care about writing good software and have the mental facilities to do so are few and far between. And that's why most software sucks. A good developer can write good software using pretty much any of the popular tools. The tools are just different ways to do the same stuff. Sure there's some overhead with react etc but it's really not that significant, the significant part is all the trash code people put on top of it.

bushbaba 28d ago
Most enterprises are comprised of a high proportion of shit developers. So you need to work with what you got
Shitty-kitty 28d ago
A shitty developer can create a far worst experience on react then on native.

hylaride 28d ago

Nuance is always a thing. Native apps are faster and better most of the time. Electron and React Native wouldn't annoy me so much if they were used with small apps where it's not worth over-optimizing. However, it's now the default for Multiplatform apps that are used constantly, including IDEs, chat apps, etc. They gobble up memory and cpu cycles and are constantly getting updates due to the shitshow that is the javascript dependancy ecosystem.

ojr 28d ago
React Native apps make more revenue than Flutter and Native apps according to Revenue Cat report published on June 3rd, 2026. https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/engineering/why-react-native-apps-make-more-money https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/engineering/why-react-native...
- WA 27d ago
  Thanks, but from the same article: "First key learning: execution matters far more than stack choice" which directly translates to: make a great app and nobody cares about the tech and this includes whether or not to use Liquid Glass.
  - ojr 23d ago
    I agree the tech doesn't matter but React Native helps with the deeply layered problem of execution.
Capricorn2481 28d ago
I would rather have the opposite? I don't want 10 people making small apps that use Electron. I would rather that be used for bigger apps where the overhead is negligible.

kevin_thibedeau 28d ago

A well built native app can still serve as a vector for harvesting personal data in ways you cannot control. A web app is inherently superior because of its security envelope.

jkubicek 28d ago
A React Native app would have all the same access to your personal data that a native app would
- kevin_thibedeau 28d ago
  That isn't a web app.

JeremyNT 28d ago

> These tools are bad, objectively! They give inferior user experiences, and waste resources (ever more important now with RAM prices what they are). They can be "bad" in some dimensions (as you mentioned) while being "good" in others (dev productivity). These frameworks didn't become popular for no reason. They have value. The parts that are "good" can easily outweigh the parts that are "objectively bad" when they enable a smaller team to get things out the door they would have had trouble shipping otherwise.

jwlake 28d ago

A badly made native app is worse than a well built react-native app. There are plenty of anti-patterns that will ruin your native app. In stories like this its much more likely that they just got sick of refactoring a big ugly code base so got buy in to throw it all away and starting over and the justification is native. Wait like 5 years and there will be a new react-native corss platform app because the native apps have too much cruft. Assuming we still have human in the loop then.

kentm 28d ago
> A badly made native app is worse than a well built react-native app. There are plenty of anti-patterns that will ruin your native app. Sure, but thats not an interesting observation unless there is something about react-native that makes those apps consistently higher quality than native apps. On the other hand, like-for-like C/C++/Rust performs better than javascript in terms of CPU and memory use, so the null hypothesis is that re-implementing would , in fact, improve things. There's little reason to think a priori that the end result would somehow be worse.
robertoandred 28d ago
I think they also got sick of supporting those open source libraries.