Comment by gbalduzzi
8 hours ago
It baffles me how much the discourse over native apps rarely takes this into consideration.
You reduce development effort by a third, it is ok to debate whether a company so big should invest into a better product anyway but it is pretty clear why they are doing this
The real question is how much better are native apps compared to Electron apps.
Yes that would take much disk space, but it takes 50Mb or 500Mb isn't noticeable for most users. Same goes for memory, there is a gain for sure but unless you open your system monitor you wouldn't know.
So even if it's something the company could afford, is it even worth it?
Also it's not just about cost but opportunity cost. If a feature takes longer to implement natively compared to Electron, that can cause costly delays.
There are cross platform GUI toolkits out there so while I am in team web for lots of reasons, generally it’s because web apps are faster and cheaper to iterate.
Cross platform GUIs might does have the same of support and distributed knowledge as HTML/CSS/JS. If that vendor goes away or the oss maintainers go a different direction, now you have an unsupported GUI platform.
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That might be true (although you do add in the mess of web frameworks), but I strongly believe that resource usage must factor into these calculations too. It's a net negative to end users if you can develop an app a bit quicker but require the end users to have multiple more times RAM, CPU, etc.
> multiple more times RAM, CPU, etc.
Part of this (especially the CPU) is teams under-optimizing their Electron apps. See the multi-X speedup examples when they look into it and move hot code to C et al.
Especially given how fast things progress, timeline and performance are a tradeoff where I'd say swaying things in favour of the latter is not per definition net positive.
There's another benefit - you don't have to keep refactoring to keep up with "progress"!
It might be a cynical take, but I don't think there is a single person in these companies that cares about end user resource usage. They might care if the target were less tech savvy people that are likely to have some laptop barely holding up with just Win11. But for a developer with a MacBook, what is one more electron window?
>You reduce development effort by a third
Done by the company which sells software which is supposed to reduce it tenfold?
> You don't casually give up massive abstraction wins
Value is value, and levers are levers, regardless of the resources you have or the difficulty of the problem you're solving.
If they can save effort with Electron and put that effort into things their research says users care about more, everyone wins.
After every time I read "save effort with Electron", I go back to Win2K VM and poke around things and realize how faster everything is than M4 Max, just because value is value, and Electron saves some effort.
> You reduce development effort by a third
Sorry to nitpick, but this should be "by three" or "by two thirds", right?