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Comment by q-rews

5 years ago

Anyone thinking this is delusional. Spotify works in a browser and there’s no non-CSS-based framework that can do that.

The reason Electron is popular is because you can have a single codebase for ALL the targets.

6 comments

q-rews

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jbverschoor  5 years ago

Actually, you could just use use react (or vue or angular with nativescript) and have one codebase with a __native__ ui on desktop + css on the browser, but keep the app-logic and UI code the same.

avh02  5 years ago

> Spotify works in a browser

Anecdata: I have used this functionality literally once in ~5 years. Safe to retire it and build a real client. I suspect most people don't use the browser.

  • q-rews  5 years ago

    Yeah your necessities don’t match Spotify’s. If they took this path, the web version is probably important for them.

  • TchoBeer  5 years ago

    I use the browser pretty frequently, I don't even have Spotify desktop on my work computer

dtagames  5 years ago

So right. As soon as you are the person paying for people and time to develop native apps, you start thinking, "Geez, I could make an identical UI with web technologies and skip all the platform stuff entirely!"

These apps are identical to native. Not one person could tell you the difference. The complaints about speed are nonsense, too. People don't benchmark apps. They use them! These Electron and other web-wrapper apps are absolutely the future of all client-side app development.

If native apps are the railroad, web apps (w/ or without a wrapper, makes no difference), are the airplane.

BTW, there are many complaints about the Spotify UI, but does anyone ever complain that it's a web-based UI? Who has ever said, "Wow, I like Spotify but, ya know, it's got a UI built with HTML and CSS and JS, so I don't wanna use it."

That's not real. Proprietary app wrappers are proprietary because the companies that make them benefit from lockdown. They will always promote their locked-down platforms, and many enterprises have millions of dollars of sunk costs in these siloed application environments. The way out of prison is through web-based apps that run anywhere without the user even knowing or caring how that happens.