At a previous company we maintained a desktop electron app for Windows and macOS. It was super bloated though and updates with Squirrel were a pain.
We kept the GUI as a web spa app (using Inferno) and wrote two small native apps with C# and Swift that would load a webview and other duties. App download size and memory consumption was reduced by like 90%. We also moved distribution and updates to the app stores of each platform.
It was a great decision.
This is the first time I see someone praising distribution and updates through native app stores. The time to get update to users and the uncertainty, that it gets through the approval process are just some of the reasons. I know nothing about Squirrel, but what were the things that improved moving to native?
I agree about dealing with Apple but having updates completely solved for us was a huge deal. We just didn't have the resources to solve this properly.
This was an app offered for free to some customers of the company. If the app had been the main commercial product we would have obviously opted for a better solution than distributing through stores or using Squirrel.
Back in 2018 we needed a server[1] that would notify Squirrel for the udpates. Squirrel worked ok on macOS but it was particularly bad on Windows. I don't remember the details... iirc Squirrel installed the actual executable in some weird folder and users would never be able to find the app if they deleted the link from the desktop.
[1] https://github.com/ArekSredzki/electron-release-server
Nice. How long did the migration take?
It was trivial to create the apps with a web view. Then we implemented new features integrated with the OS that we didn't have before. This was back in 2018 so my memory is a bit fuzzy but I'd say in total 2-3 weeks of work. We definitely lost more time with Squirrel and Electron than that...