It is baffling how these AI companies, with billions of dollars, cannot build native applications, even with the help of AI. From a UI perspective, these are mostly just chat apps, which are not particularly difficult to code from scratch. Before the usual excuses come about how it is impossible to build a custom UI, consider software that is orders of magnitude more complex, such as raddbg, 10x, Superluminal, Blender, Godot, Unity, and UE5, or any video game with a UI. On top of that, programs like Claude Cowork or Codex should, by design, integrate as deeply with the OS as possible. This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron.
>This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron.
Who told you that? You can write entire C libraries and call them from Electron just fine. Browser is a native application after all. All this "native applications" debate boils down to the UI implementation strategy. Maintaining three separate UI stacks (WinUI, SwiftUI, GTK/Qt) is dramatically more expensive and slower to iterate on than a single web-based UI with shared logic
We already have three major OSes, all doing things differently. The browsers, on the other hand, use the same language, same rendering model, same layout system, and same accessibility layer everywhere, which is a massive abstraction win.
You don't casually give up massive abstraction wins just to say "it's native". If "just build it natively" were actually easier, faster, or cheaper at scale, everyone would do just that.
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
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.
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?
I agree. I also find it interesting that many developers don't mind using Docker to run Redis / Postgresql and other services on Mac that are very simple to install and run directly. That's fine, but then they don't get to complain about Electron.
There are valid use cases for Docker on those types of software, but most users just use Docker for convenience or because "everyone else" uses them. Maybe influenced by Linux users where Docker has lower overhead. It's convenient for sure, but it also has a cost on Mac/Windows
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"!
Of course you do!
Microsoft makes a new UI framework every couple of years, liquid glass from apple and gnome has a new gtk version every so often.
Microsoft gets largely pilloried on every UI rethink, Apple’s Liquid Glass just annoyed everyone I’ve heard comment on it, and, fwiw, YouTube Music asking if it feels outdated is an unnecessary annoyance.
>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.
That's like a luxury lumber company stuffing its showrooms full of ikea furniture.
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.
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.
I mean the initial release of Qt predates JavaScript by a few months and CSS by more than a year. GTK is only younger by a few years and both remain actively maintained.
Argument feels more like FUD than something rooted in factual reality.
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> You reduce development effort by a third
Sorry to nitpick, but this should be "by three" or "by two thirds", right?
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.
It absolutely is noticeable the moment you have to run several of these electron “apps” at once.
I have a MacBook with 16GB of RAM and I routinely run out of memory from just having Slack, Discord, Cursor, Figma, Spotify and a couple of Firefox tabs open. I went back to listening to mp3s with a native app to have enough memory to run Docker containers for my dev server.
Come on, I could listen to music, program, chat on IRC or Skype, do graphic design, etc. with 512MB of DDR2 back in 2006, and now you couldn’t run a single one of those Electron apps with that amount of memory. How can a billion dollar corporation doing music streaming not have the resources to make a native app, but the Songbird team could do it for free back in 2006?
I’ve shipped cross platform native UIs by myself. It’s not that hard, and with skyrocketing RAM prices, users might be coming back to 8GB laptops. There’s no justification for a big corporation not to have a native app other than developer negligence.
On that note, I could also comfortably fit a couple of chat windows (skype) on a 17'' CRT (1024x768) back in those days. It's not just the "browser-based resource hog" bit that sucks - non-touch UIs have generally become way less space-efficient.
I think the comparison between native apps and Electron apps is conflating two things:
- Native apps integrate well with the native OS look and feel and native OS features. I'd say it's nice to have, but not a must have, especially considering that the same app can run on multiple platforms.
- Native apps use much less RAM than Electron apps. I believe this one is a real issue for many users. Running Slack, Figma, Linear, Spotify, Discord, Obsidian, and others at the same time consumes a lot of memory for no good reason.
Which makes me wonder: Is there anything that could removed from Electron to make it lighter, similar to what Qt does?
Also, modern native UIs became looking garbage on desktops / laptops, where you usually want a high information density.
Just look at this TreeView in WinUI2 (w/ fluent design) vs a TreeView in the good old event viewer. It just wastes SO MUCH space!
https://f003.backblazeb2.com/file/sharexxx/ShareX/2026/02/mm...
And imo it's just so much easier to write a webapp, than fiddle with WinUI. Of course you can still build on MFC or Win32, but meh.
> If "just build it natively" were actually easier, faster, or cheaper at scale, everyone would do just that
Value prop of product quality aside, isn't the AI claim that it helps you be more productive? I would expect that OpenAI would run multiple frontends and that they'd use Codex to do it.
Ie are they using their own AI (I would assume it's semi-vibe-coded) to just get out a new product or using AI to create a new product using the productivity gains to let them produce higher quality?
On a side note, the company I work for (RemObjects, not speaking on their behalf) has a value ethos specifically about using the native UI layers, and encouraging our customers to do the same. (We make dev tools, a compiler supporting six languages (C#, Java, Go, etc) plus IDEs.)
Our IDE does this: common code / logic, then a native macOS layer and a WPF layer. Yes, it takes a little more work (less than you'd think!) but we think it is the right way to do it.
And what I hope is that AI will let people do the same -- lower the cost and effort to do things like this. If Electron was used because it was a cheap way to get cross-platform apps out, AI should now be the same layer, the same intermediate 'get stuff done' layer, but done better. And I don't think this prevents doing things faster because AI can work in parallel. Instead of one agent to update the frontend, you have two to update both frontends, you know?
We're building an AI agent, btw. Initially targeting Delphi, which is a third party's product we try to support and provide modern solutions for. We'll be adding support for our own toolchains too.
What I fear is that people will apply AI at the wrong level. That they'll produce the same things, but faster: not the same things, but better (and faster.)
It's about consistency - you want to build an app that looks and functions the same on all platforms as much as possible. Regardless of if you are hand-coding or vibe-coding 3 entirely separate software stacks, getting everything consistent is going to be a challenge and subtle inconsistencies will sneak in.
It comes back to fundamental programming guidelines like DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) - if you have three separate implementations in different languages for everything, changes will be come harder and you will move slower. These golden guidelines still stand in a vibe-code world.
The gap here is that the company has the money and native apps are so clearly better. With an interactive app a company like OpenAI could really tweak the experience for Android and iOS which have different UX philosophies and featuresets in order to give the best experience possible. It's really a no brainer imho.
> the company has the money
It's not about money. It's not a tradeoff in cost vs quality - it's a tradeoff in development speed. Shipping N separate native versions requires more development time for any given change: you must implement everything (at least every UI) N times, which drastically increases the design & planning & coordination required vs just building and shipping one implementation.
Do you want to move slower to get "native feel", or do you want to ship fast and get N times as much feature dev done? In a competitive race while the new features are flowing, development speed always wins.
Once feature development settles down, polish starts to matter more and the slowdown becomes less important, and then you can refocus.
Yeah that's why startups often pick iOS first, get product-market fit, and then do Android. The fallacy that abstractions tout is that Android and iOS are the same.
They are not.
A good iOS app is not 1:1 equivalent to what a good Android app would be for the same goal. Treating them as such just gives users a lowest common denominator product.
> it's a tradeoff in development speed
Doesn't this get thrown out the window now that everyone claims you can be 10x, 50x, 100x more productive with AI? Hell people were claiming you can ask a bunch of AI agents to build a browser from scratch, so surely the dev speed argument no longer applies.
Even if we assume a developer is actually 10x more productive with AI, if you triple their workload by having them build 3 native apps now you're only 3.33x more productive.
No, you would be ten times as productive. You would ship three different apps 3,3 times faster than you previously only shipped one.
The productivity comparison must be made between how long it takes to ship a certain amount of stuff.
So, this certainly was a valid argument. But it seems to me that the whole value proposition behind these agentic AI coding tools is to be able to move beyond this. Are we very far from being able to define some Figmas and technical specs and have Codex generate the UIs in 5 different stacks? If that isn't a reality in the near future, then why should we buy AI Tools?
Wouldn’t maintaining the different UI stacks be something a language model could handle? Creating a new front end where the core logic is already defined or making a new one from an existing example has gone pretty fast for me. The “maintenance“ cost might not be as high as you think.
>If "just build it natively" were actually easier, faster, or cheaper at scale, everyone would do just that.
Exactly. Years go by and HN keeps crying about this despite it being extremely easy to understand for anyone. For such a smart community, it's baffling how some debates are so dumb.
The only metric really worth reviewing is resource usage (and perhaps appearance). These factors aren't relevant to the general population as otherwise, most people wouldn't use these apps (which clearly isn't the case).
React Native is able to build abstractions on top of both Android and iOS that uses native UI. Microsoft even have a package for doing a "React Native" for Windows: https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-windows
It's weird that we don't have a unified "React Native Desktop" that would build upon the react-native-windows package and add similar backends for MacOS and Linux. That way we could be building native apps while keeping the stuff developers like from React.
There are such implementations for React Native: https://reactnative.dev/docs/out-of-tree-platforms
React Native desktop on Linux isn't a thing, the GTK backend is abandonned.
So if you want a multiplatform desktop app also supporting Linux, React Native isn't going to cut it.
https://reactnative.dev/docs/out-of-tree-platforms says otherwise
React Native Skia allegedly runs on Linux too
React Native Skia seems abandoned. But maybe this will make React Native on Linux viable
https://github.com/gtkx-org/gtkx
React Native Skia last commit is three years ago.
the three OSes is BS, none of them cares about linux
This is such a toy webdev take. It's like you guys forget that the web-browser wouldn't work at all if not for the server half, all compiled to native code.
The browser is compiled to native code. It wasn't that long ago that we had three seperate web browsers who couldn't agree on the same set of standards either.
Try porting your browser to Java or C# and see how much faster it is then. The OS the browser and the server run on are compiled to native code. Sun gave up on HotJava web browser in the 1990's, because it couldn't do %10 or %20 of what Netscape or IE could do, and was 10 x slower.
Not everybody is running a website selling internet widgets. Some of us actually have more on the line if our systems fail or are not performant than "oooh our shareholders are gonna be pissed".
People running critical emergency response systems day in, day out.
The very system you typed this bullshit on is running native code. But oh no, thats "too hard" for the webdev crowd. Everyone should bend to accomodate them. The OS should be ported to run inside the browser, because the browser is "so good".
Good one. It's hilarious to see this Silicon Valley/Bay Area, chia-seed eating bullshit in cheap spandex riding their bikes while the trucks shipping shit from coast to coast passing them by.
The situation for Desktop development is nasty. Microsoft had so many halfassed frameworks and nobody knows which one to use. It’s probably the de facto platform on Windows IS Electron, and Microsoft use them often, too.
On MacOS is much better. But most of the team either ended up with locked in Mac-only or go cross platform with Electron.
I guess it shows how geriatric I am with desktop app development these days, but does no one use Qt anymore? Wasn't the dream for that to be a portable and native platform to write GUI apps? Presumably that could abstract away which bullshit Microsoft framework they came out with this week.
I haven't touched desktop application programming in a very long time and I have no desire to ever do so again after trying to learn raw GTK a million years ago, so I'm admittedly kind of speaking out of my ass here.
Qt is still used, but I think part of the reason it is less used is that C++ isn't always the right language anymore for building GUI application.
That’s actually why we're working on Slint (https://slint.dev): It's a cross-platform native UI toolkit where the UI layer is decoupled from the application language, so you can use Rust, JavaScript, Python, etc. for the logic depending on what fits the project better.
How can C++ not be the "right" language? It seems to meet all the requirements for event-driven GUIs - event handlers are function callbacks after all...
C++ works, but compared to other languages it's often no longer the most productive choice for UI work. Modern UI code is mostly glue and state management, where fast iteration matters more than squeezing out maximum performance. And when performance does matter, there are also newer, safer languages.
For teams comfortable with C++ or with existing C++ libraries to integrate, it can of course still be a strong choice, just not the preferred one for most current teams.
But desktop C++ isn't difficult or slow to write...
It seems odd to me that the software world has gone in the direction of "quick to write - slow to run". It should be the other way around. Things of quality (eg. paintings by Renaissance masters) took time to create, despite being quick to observe.
It also seems proven that releasing software quickly ("fast iteration") doesn't lead to quality - see how many releases of the YouTube app or Netflix there are on iOS or Android; if speedy releases are important, it is valuing rush to production over quality, much like a processed food version of edible content.
In a world that is also facing energy issues, sluggish and inefficient performance should be shunned, not welcomed?
I suppose this mentality is endemic, and why we see a raft of cruddy slow software these days, where upcoming developers ("current teams") no longer value performance over ease of their job. It can only get worse if the "it's good enough" mentality persists. It's quite sad.
The part that takes time in UI isn’t wiring up components, it’s the small changes like something is a pixel to the right or that gap is two pixels wide. Changing those in a C++ project means recompiling and that adds up to significant overhead over a day of polishing the UI. If C++ was able to get builds out in less than a second, this wouldn’t be an issue. People value performance in their own tools more than the tools of their customer.
In modern Qt you don't write UI in C++ anymore - you do that in QML. It is far simpler to create amazing pixel perfect UIs with drooling-inducing animations in QML. I wrote a blog post that talks a bit about this[1].
[1] https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor
In wxWidgets you use sizers, so you don't work on pixel-level alignments. I can understand if you're using an ancient framework like MFC, but even then I seem to recall there was a sizer equivalent system (or it is easy enough to write a class to do so, moving components).
I think it is a daft thing to move to shipping a colossal web framework and entire browser simply because of 1px UI alignments (which have been a solved problem for decades in C++ anyway).
Qt means C++. I'll take Typescript over C++ for a GUI task any day.
Qt is also pretty memory-hungry; maybe rich declarative (QML) skinnable adaptable UIs with full a11y support, etc just require some RAM no matter what. And it also looks a wee bit "non-native" to purists, except on Windows, where the art of uniform native look is lost.
Also, if you ever plan extensions / plugin support, you already basically have it built-in.
Yes, a Qt-based program may be wonderfully responsive. But an Electron-based app can be wonderfully responsive, too. And both can feel sluggish, even on great hardware. It all depends on a right architecture, on not doing any (not even "guaranteed fast") I/O in the GUI thread, mostly. This takes a bit of skill and, most importantly, consideration; both are in short supply, as usual.
The biggest problem with Electron apps is their size. Tauri, which relies on the system-provided web view component, is the reasonable way.
I don't get this HN worship of Qt. Have you ever used Qt apps on macOS? They don't feel native at all. They feel sort-of native-emulating in the same way wxWidgets apps on macOS feel: they use native controls but all the little details including design language are off.
I'm not saying this is a huge problem for me even if it bothers me personally. But if you're here on HN advocating native over Electron, then it seems logical to me that you would care about being truly native instead of merely "using native controls while feeling off".
This is even before getting to the point that Qt isn't truly native. They just draw controls in a style that looks native, they don't actually use native controls. wxWidgets uses native controls but they don't behave better despite that.
This is not because of Qt - it is due to some (most) Qt developers not caring enough. I created my Qt app feel native both on macOS and Windows[1]. It did require a lot of tuning - but those are things I'll reuse across other apps.
[1] https://get-notes.com/
god damn, I've never though Qt app could be this smooth and looking nice.
They don’t look native on Windows, either.
And GTK4 is even very usable from Rust too. It’s not a bad development experience, but these companies probably find 100 webdevs for every system programmer.
Come on GUI apps are not systems programming, what's with this title inflation.
One reason why I personally never bothered is the licensing of some of its important parts, which is a choice of either GPL or commercial. Which is fair, but too bothersome for some use-cases (e.g. mobile apps which are inherently GPL-unfriendly). Electron and the likes are typically MIT/BSD/etc licensed.
I built my Block Editor (Notion-style) in Qt C++ and QML[1].
[1] https://get-notes.com
Qt is still pretty good, but it's dated in comparison to newer frameworks like Flutter and React Native. No hot reloading of changes, manual widget management vs. React where you just re-define the whole UI every frame and it handles changes magically, no single source of truth for state, etc.
That's false, see QML hot reload[1].
[1] https://www.qt.io/blog/speed-up-qt-development-with-qml-hot-...
That's a third party paid addon. Hardly a fair comparison.
This is another common excuse.
You don't need to use microsoft's or apple's or google's shit UI frameworks. E.g. see https://filepilot.tech/
You can just write all the rendering yourself using metal/gl/dx. if you didn't want to write the rendering yourself there are plenty of libraries like skia, flutter's renderer, nanovg, etc
Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years.
You will be outcompeted if you waste your time reinventing the wheel and optimizing for stuff that doesn't matter. There is some market for highly optimized apps like e.g. Sublime Text, but you can clearly see that the companies behind them are struggling.
>Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years.
I see complains about RAM and slugginess against Slack and countless others Electron apps every fucking day, same as with Adobe forcing web rendered UI parts in Photoshop, and other such cases. Forums are full of them, colleagues always complain about it.
Of course they complain about them, but those are the users, not the purchasers.
How are Adobe and Slack/Salesforce doing?
Are they hurting for customers?
the people that USE the software the most are not the people BUYING the software. it’s why all enterprise software has trash UX.
do you think i as a software engineer like using Jira? Outlook? etc? Heck even the trendy stuff is broken. Anthropic took took 6 months to fix a flickering claude code. -_-
Yes that was my point.
Not relevant point though. I was answering to this "I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years", I wasn't arguing that such apps don't make money.
McDonald’s isn’t hurting for customers either. Doesn’t mean their food is anything a chef ought to aspire to.
I'm loving it
McDonald's is renown for speed of service, a bit ironic to compare that to slow apps
Maybe 40 years ago.
Neither it means that McDonald's should aspire to be a chef
Sure, aspiring to mediocrity at a cost to others is a choice.
Not seeing complaints doesn't mean they don't exist. Not to mention ui latency that is common in electron apps that is just a low-level constant annoyance.
I have complained about literally every Electron based app I have ever used. How would you know there are no complaints?
There are complaints and then users keep using these super popular and bloated apps. Techies make it seem like bloat is a capital sin but it isn't.
When given the option, I never use such apps. I am rarely given the option, however.
Q.e.d.
He who holds the purse strings, decides. The people who pay to have the apps made get to decide and they have decided that what geeks want doesn't matter.
And every time a geek tries to change that, he only wins for a short while and then we're back to the primordial soup.
Oh, and regular users obviously don't care enough.
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I don't bother complaining about Electron-based applications to the developer, and I expect that's not an unusual position. It's not like the downsides are hidden, unique, or a surprise, and if the developers' priorities aligned with ours, they wouldn't have picked electron in the first place.
I use web-tech apps because I have to, and because they're adequate, not because it's an optimal user experience.
> Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years.
Nothing is worse than reading something like this. A good software developer cares. It’s wrong to assume customers don't care simply because they don't know what's going on under the hood. Considering the downsides and the resulting side effects (latency, more CPU and RAM consumption, fans spinning etc.), they definitely do care. For example, Microsoft has been using React components in their UI, thinking customers wouldn’t care, but as we have been seeing lately, they do care.
I don’t complain about Electron because I didn’t install the app if I could avoid it.
> I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app to be reported in the past 10 years.
When was the last time complaining about this did anything?
> Customers simply don't care.
They do, but they don't know what's causing it. 8GB of RAM usage for Codex App is clown-level ridiculous.
That just means your feedback system is trash if it fails to surface such an obvious and common pain point in user experience. Tough that's an extremely common state of feedback systems. But also, the general computer knowledge isn't that high for every end user to connect some sluggishness in another app to your app wasting ram and causing disk swaps, that eliminates a lot of end user complaints
> reinventing the wheel
what exactly are you inventing by using a framework "invented" decades ago and used by countless apps in all those years?
They don’t care, or they don’t know? What they do know is their computer that’s only 5 years old goes to shit with only a few apps open. Time for a new laptop.
Thanks for contributing to the obsolescence cycle.
People absolutely care, but the issue is that no single company/app is really responsible. It's the tragedy of the commons, but for users RAM. No one electron app uses all the RAM, but just a couple are enough to make a common 16GB machine slow down massively.
Even with SublimeText, most popular IDE is VSCode, most popular interface design tool Figma, all popular chat platforms and so on are all electron based. If people were desperate for faster platforms they'll be migrating to them.
> Even with SublimeText, most popular IDE is VSCode
What a weird comparison, one is free, another one is a premium app, of course a lot of people prefer some suffering over paying money
Your mistaking supply-side path dependent outcomes that produce a lack of consumer choice with consumer preference. No consumer prefers slow, bloated, non-native software, but they're stuck with what they can get.
There is competition for Figma. Sketch.
There's plenty of competition for VSCode too.
Don't forget that these Electron apps outcompeted native apps. Figma and VSCode were underdogs to native apps at one point. This is why your supply side argument doesn't make any sense.
> There's plenty of competition for VSCode too.
But there isn't, not if you include all the extensions and remember the price
So an Electron app won. Seems like Electron wasn't a hinderance.
Sure, you can ignore that it was a hindrance just like you ignored ignored the previous point.
Like how you ignored my point too?
If it was a hindrance, why did it win?
Seems clear to me that Electron's higher RAM usage did not affect adoption. Instead, Electron's ability to write once and ship in any platform is what allowed VSCode to win.
> Like how you ignored my point too?
No, differently
> If it was a hindrance, why did it win?
Because reality is not as primitive as you portray it to be, you can have hindrances and boosts with the overall positive even winning effect? That shouldn't be that hard!
> Seems clear to me that Electron's higher RAM usage did not affect adoption.
Again, it only seems clear because you ignore all the dirt, including basic things (like here, it's not just ram, is disk use, startup speed, but also like before with competition) and strangely don't consider many factors.
> Instead, Electron's ability to write once and ship in any platform is what allowed VSCode to win.
So nothing to do with it using the most popular web stack, meaning the largest pool of potential contributors to the editor or extensions??? What about other cross platform frameworks that also allowed that??? (and of course it's not any platform, just 3 desktop ones where VSc runs)
Are you arguing that Electron helped VSCode win or what? Because Electron being able to use a popular web stack is also a benefit.
What is your point?
all the extensions followed popularity and ease of development. So, cart horse.
Do a search for "Microsoft teams slow crash" and you'll find a billion complaints by normies.
They're only doing well because of their illegal monopolistic practices not being cracked down on.
I care. I refuse to use Electron slop unless it is literally the only option available (usually due to some proprietary locked-in platform eg Discord). I will happily pay significant sums of money for well-made native apps that often have fewer features than the Electron versions, simply for the pleasure of using tools that integrate seamlessly with my operating system. Not all of us have given up on software quality.
The various GPU-accelerated terminal projects always make me chuckle
Not sure why, terminals are literally GPU accelerated text rendering solutions since the very beginning of rendering text
Heck, not even just a separate card or whatever, back in the terminal days where you practically had a whole separate small computer just to display the output of the bigger computer on a screen instead of paper.
Because there is no point in reporting such complains. Just a waste of time.
> Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about microplastics in the past 10 years.
> You will be outcompeted if you waste your time reinventing the wheel and optimizing for stuff that doesn't matter. There is some market for safe, environmentally-friendly products, but you can clearly see that the companies that make them are struggling.
ok.
How is File Pilot for accessibility and for all of the little niceties like native scrolling, clipboard interaction, drag and drop, and so on? My impression is that the creator is has expertly focused on most/all of these details, but I don't have Windows to test.
I insist on good UI as well, and, as a web developer, have spent many hours hand rolling web components that use <canvas>. The most complicated one is a spreadsheet/data grid component that can handle millions of rows, basically a reproduction of Google Sheets tailored to my app's needs. I insist on not bloating the front-end package with a whole graph of dependencies. I enjoy my NIH syndrome. So I know quality when I see it (File Pilot). But I also know how tedious reinventing the wheel is, and there are certain corners that I regularly cut. For example there's no way a blind user could use my spreadsheet-based web app (https://github.com/glideapps/glide-data-grid is better than me in this aspect, but there's no way I'm bringing in a million dependencies just to use someone else's attempt to reinvent the wheel and get stuck with all of their compromises).
The answer to your original question about why these billion dollar companies don't create artisanal software is pretty straightforward and bleak, I imagine. But there are a few actually good reasons not to take the artisanal path.
File pilot is extremely good in my experience, literally the only issue is it doesn't display the sync status on icons in a Dropbox folder.
I'd love to see some opensource projects actually do a good job of this. Its a lot of work, especially if you want:
- Good cross platform support (missing in filepilot)
- Want applications to feel native everywhere. For example, all the obscure keyboard shortcuts for moving around a text input box on mac and windows should work. iOS and Android should use their native keyboards. IME needs to work. Etc
- Accessibility support for people who are blind and low vision. (Screen readers, font scaling, etc)
- Ergonomic language bindings
Hitting these features is more or less a requirement if you want to unseat electron.
I think this would be a wonderful project for a person or a small, dedicated team to take on. Its easier than it ever used to be thanks to improvements in font rendering, cross platform graphics libraries (like webgpu, vulcan, etc) and improvements in layout engines (Clay). And how much users have dropped their standards for UI consistency ever since electron got popular and microsoft gave up having a consistent UI toolkit in windows.
There are a few examples of teams doing this in house (eg Zed). But we need a good opensource project.
We're actually working on a native open source cross-platform UI toolkit called Slint that’s trying to do exactly that. https://slint.dev
But Electron doesn’t hit that bar even
It gets pretty close.
Which parts in particular do you think electron misses from this list?
yep, you're right to call that.
> You don't need to use microsoft's or apple's or google's shit UI frameworks. E.g. see https://filepilot.tech/
That's only for Windows though, it seems? Maybe the whole "just write all the rendering yourself using metal/gl/dx" is slightly harder than you think.
The proof that rendering is not _that_ hard because the flutter team did it when they switched off skia (although technically they still use skia for text rendering, I'll admit that text rendering and layout is hard)
How is a fact that someone did something proof that it isn’t hard?
I mean, every cross-platform commercial DAW manages to do it? Bitwig, Renoise, Reaper, even VCV.
[delayed]
That'll work great until your first customer from a CJK or RTL language writes in, "Hey, how come I can't type in your app?", or the blind user writes in "Hey how come your app is completely blank?" then you'll be right in the middle of the "Find Out" phase
These strategies are fine for toy apps but you cannot ship a production app to millions or even thousands of people without these basics.
“Render yourself with GPU APIs” has all the same problems with a11y, compatibility, inconsistent behaviour that electron has - the only one it might fix is performance and plenty of apps have messed that one up too
They’re all iterating products really fast. This Codex is already different than the last Codex app. This is all disposable software until the landscape settles.
It's essentially asking application developers to wipe ass for OS developers like Microsoft. It's applaudible when you do it, understandable when you don't.
Even though OpenAI has a lot of cash to burn, they're not in a good position now and getting butchered by Anthropic and possibly Gemini later.
If any major player in this AI field has the power to do it's probably Google. But again, they've done the Flutter part, and the result is somewhat mixed.
At the end of the day, it's only HN people and a fraction of Redditors who care. Electron is tolerated by the silent majority. Nice native or local-first alternatives are often separate, niche value propositions when developers can squeeze themselves in over-saturated markets. There's a long way before the AI stuff loses novelty and becomes saturated.
"native" is used for different things, from "use the platform's default gui toolkit" to "compile to a machine code binary". the former is a bit of a mess, but the latter is strictly better than wrapping a web view and shipping an entire chrome fork to display and interpret it. just write something in qt and forget about native look and feel, and the performance gain will be enough to greatly improve the user experience.
Should just use javafx or swing. Take a leaf out of intellij which while it as it's own performance problems (although not from the fact of the ui framework) has a fantastic ui across Mac / windows / nix
Java swing is way underrated despite being very complex. It baffles me why this just sort of withered on the vine.
(I was a swing developer for several years)
The web sucked all the oxygen out of the room.
It really was Oracle’s fault – they neglected deployment for too long. Deploying Java applications was simply too painful, and neither JLink nor JPackage existed.
Non-native UI widgets, non-native runtime, non-native language
I can’t tell if this word salad is sarcasm or genuine.
From the suggestions it looks like sarcasm, but you never can tell these days
Qt with QML works fine. The real reason is that companies can't hire enough native developers because the skill is comparitively rare.
As I outlined in a sibling comment. You can still use React and your JS developers. Just don't ship a whole browser with your app.
May be an app that is as complex as Outlook needs the pixel-perfect tweaking of every little button that they need to ship their own browser for exact version match. But everything else can use *system native browser*. Use Tauri or Wails or many other solutions like these
That said, I do agree on the other comments about TUIs etc. Yes, nobody cares about the right abstractions, not even the companies that literally depend on automating these applications
Given how much money they have, and the reach they're attempting to achieve, is it really asking too much that they hire native development teams? It's not like an application of this scale requires an army of engineers.
These companies have BILLIONS of dollars and some of the smartest people in the world and access to bleeding edge AI
There should be no excuses! Figure it out!
it'll be the least important thing to do
microsoft also uses react native for the start menu and also bricked that during a recent upgrade apparently... along with breaking other stuff.
Win32 is the platform to use on Microsoft Windows. Everything else is built on top of it. So it will (a) work (b) be there forever.
Do not give a shit about how they excuse doing a bad job. If their tools make them that much more productive, and being the developer of those tools should allow you to make great use of them.
Use native for osx Use .Net framework for windows Use whatever on Linux.
Its just being lazy and ineffective. I also do not care about whatever "business" justification anyone can come up with for half assing it.
This. Even Linux is nasty. Qt and GTK are both horrible messes to use.
It would be nice if someone made a way to write desktop apps in JavaScript with a consistent, cross-platform modern UI (i.e. swipe to refresh, tabs, beautiful toggle switches, not microscopic check boxes) but without resorting to rendering everything inside a bloated WebKit browser.
Qt is not a horrible mess to use, the problem is just people don't bother to learn any tech stack outside web. It's so obvious that this is the issue to anybody who actually does native development.
That’s what React Native is. But JavaScript is the problem.
Can you explain why GTK is a mess?
It’s just irrelevant for most users. These companies are getting more adoption than they can handle, no matter how clunky their desktop apps are. They’re optimizing for experimentation. Not performance.
While this may be true for casual users, for dev native products like Codex, the desktop experience actually matters a lot. When you are living in the tool for hours, latency, keyboard handling, file system access, and OS-level integration stop being “nice to have” and start affecting real productivity. web or Electron apps are fine for experimentation, but they hit a ceiling fast for serious workflows -- especially if the icp is mostly technical users
VSCode is arguably one of the most if not the most popular code editor these days…
And they're pretty much the only example of an embedded browser architecture actually performing tolerably and integrating well with the native environment.
Vscode’s performance is pretty bad. It’s “tolerable” just like any electron app.
Still good enough for the majority of the users.
Fair, I think I'm certainly in the minority. Especially now more then ever with an increasing amount of non-technical people exploring vibe coding, 'good enough' really is good enough for most users
[flagged]
Well unfortunately, that’s just how I write. None of my posts are LLM-generated, so I'm sorry they come across that way.
Apologies.
It's not irrelevant for developers neither for users. Tiktok has shown that users deeply care about the experience and they'll flock en-masse to something that has a good experience.
The experience in the claude app is fine.
More adoption? I don't think so... It feels to me that these models && tools are getting more verbose/consuming more tokens to compensate for a decrease in usage. I know my usage of these tools has fallen off a cliff as it become glaringly obvious they're useful in very limited scopes.
I think most people start off overusing these tools, then they find the few small things that genuinely improve their workflows which tend to be isolated and small tasks.
Moltbot et al, to me, seems like a psyop by these companies to get token consumption back to levels that justify the investments they need. The clock is ticking, they need more money.
I'd put my money on token prices doubling to tripling over the next 12-24 months.
> I'd put my money on token prices doubling to tripling over the next 12-24 months.
Chinese open weights models make this completely infeasible.
What do weights have to do with how much it costs to run inference? Inference is heavily subsidized, the economics of it don't make any sense.
Anthropic and OpenAI could open source their models and it wouldn't make it any cheaper to run those models.. You still need $500k in GPUs and a boatload of electricity to serve like 3 concurrent sessions at a decent tok/ps.
There are no open source models, Chinese or otherwise that are going to be able to be run profitably and give you productivity gains comparable to a foundation model. No matter what, running LLMs is expensive and the capex required per tok/ps is only increasing, and the models are only getting more compute intensive.
The hardware market literally has to crash for this to make any sense from a profitability standpoint, and I don't see that happening, therefor prices have to go up. You can't just lose billions year after year forever. None of this makes sense to me. This is simple math but everyone is literally delusional atm.
Open weights means that the current prices for inference of Chinese models are indicative of their cost to run because.
https://openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k2.5
It's a fantasy to believe that every single one of these 8 providers is serving at incredibly subsidized dumping prices 50% below cost and once that runs out suddenly you'll pay double for 1M of tokens for this model. It's incredibly competitive with Sonnet 4.5 for coding at 20% of the token price.
I encourage you to become more familiar with the market and stop overextrapolating purely based on rumored OpenAI numbers.
I'm not making any guesses, I happen to know for a fact what it costs. Please go try to sell inference and compete on price. You actually have no clue what you're talking about. I knew when I sent that response I was going to get "but Kimi!"
The numbers you stated sound off ($500k capex + electricity per 3 concurrent requests?). Especially now that the frontier has moved to ultra sparse MoE architectures. I’ve also read a couple of commodity inference providers claiming that their unit economics are profitable.
You're delusional, I didn't even include the labor the install and run the damn thing. More than 500k
Okay, so you are claiming "every single one of those 8 providers, along with all others who don't serve openrouter but are at similar price points, are subsidizing by more than 50%".
That's an incredibly bold claim that would need quite a bit of evidence, and just waving "$500k in gpus" isn't it. Especially when individuals are reporting more than enough tps at native int4 with <$80k setups, without any of the scaling benefits that commercial inference providers have.
Imagine thinking that $80k setups to run Kimi and serve a single user session is evidence that inference providers are running at cost, or even close to it. Or that this fact is some sort of proof that token pricing will come down. All you one-shotted llm dependents said the same thing about Deepseek.
I know you need to cope because your competency is 1:1 correlated to the quality and quantity of tokens you can afford, so have fun with your Think for me SaaS while you can afford it. You have no clue the amount of engineering that goes into provide inference at scale. I wasn't even including the cost of labor.
It directly disproves this wild claim
> You still need $500k in GPUs and a boatload of electricity to serve like 3 concurrent sessions at a decent tok/ps.
as being patent bullshit, after which the burden is squarely on you to back up the remainder of your claims.
You are literally telling me that an open source model costs $80k "at decent tok/ps (whatever that means)" to run a single session as proof something. How come people aren't dropping Anthropic for Kimi, it costs 10x less... You aren't a serious person worth engaging with.
It really is insane how far it's gone. All of the subsidization and free usage is deeply anticompetitive, and it is only a profitable decision if they can recoup all the losses. It's either a bubble and everything will crash, or within a few years once the supplier market settles, they will eventually start engaging in cartel-like behavior and ratchet up the price level to turn on the profits.
I suspect making the models more verbose is also a source of inflation. You’d expect an advanced model to nail down the problem succinctly, rather than spawning a swarm of agents that brute force something resembling an answer. Biggest scam ever.
- Video games often use HTML/JS-based UI these days.
- UE5 has its own custom UI framework, which definitely does not feel "native" on any platform. Not really any better than Electron.
- You can easily call native APIs from Electron.
I agree that Electron apps that feel "web-y" or hog resources unnecessarily are distasteful, but most people don't know or care whether the apps they're running use native UI frameworks, and being able to reassign web developers to work on desktop apps is a significant selling point that will keep companies coming back to Electron instead of native.
I have been building Desktop apps with Go + Wails[1]. I happen to know Go, but if you are ai-coding even that is not necessary.
A full fledged app, that does everything I want, is ~ 10MB. I know Tauri+Rust can get it to probably 1 MB. But it is a far cry from these Electron based apps shipping 140MB+ . My app at 10MB does a lot more, has tons of screens.
Yes, it can be vibe coded and it is especially not an excuse these days.
[1] https://wails.io/
Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Slack, Spotify? Cursor? VsCode? I have like 10 copies of Chrome in my machine!
I've looked into Tauri and Wails, but they don't seem realistic for a cross-platform app with wide distribution across multiple platforms and platform versions.
One of Electron's main selling points is that you control the browser version. Anything that relies on the system web view (like Tauri and Wails) will either force you to aggressively drop support for out-of-date OS versions, or constantly check caniuse.com and ship polyfills like you're writing a normal web app. It also forces you to test CSS that touches form controls or window chrome on every supported major version of every browser, which is just a huge pain. And you'll inevitably run into bugs with the native -> web glue that you wouldn't hit with Electron.
It is absolutely wasteful to ship a copy of Chrome with every desktop app, but Tauri/Wails don't seem like viable alternatives at the moment. As far as I can tell, there aren't really any popular commercial apps using them, so I imagine others have come to the same conclusion.
If the web-interface of a website can serve same HTML to all browsers, these UI can as well. I don't think we have IE6 level incompatibility these days. I have no idea what specific incompatibility you are talking about. I am writing my 4th desktop app since early 2025.
But sure, you could have some specific need, but I find it hard to believe for these simple apps.
Yes, but most people don’t do that. Companies are optimizing to ship features fast, not trying to min/max resource usage when majority don’t care.
This is a new era where “if it works more or less well, ux/dx is fine, let’s ship it” has more moat than ever. Everything else is really secondary.
I am in love with wails. having python and JS background with no go experience. I pm'ed Ai agents to create a fairly complex desktop app for my own use. it is day and night in terms of performance compared to lightest electron app.
Wails is pretty good. I wrote a couple of apps but since I'm on macOS I ended up rewriting them in SwiftUI and that's much lighter of course since it uses all native APIs.
Wow Wails looks interesting! Hadn't heard of it before.
Interesting. Does the Wails renderer support the full set of what Webkit/Chromium supports?
It just uses the system web view, so it depends on the user's platform/version.
Given that OpenAI managed to single-handedly triple the price of RAM globally, people will very much care about their chat application consuming what little scraps are left over for them, even if they don't know enough about anything to know why their system is running poorly.
My main take is exactly the opposite. Why not build everything with a simple text interface (shell command) so the models learn to use these tools natively in pretraining. Even TUI like codex-cli or claude code are needless abstractions for such use cases and make full automation hard. You could add as many observability or input layers for humans as you want but the core should be simple calls that are saved in historical and documentation logs. [the headless/noninteractive modes come close, as do the session logs]
TUI is easy to train on, but hard to use for users. Part of the reason it’s easier to have LLMs use a bunch of Unix tools for us is that their text interface is tedious and hard to remember. If you’re a top 5% expert in those tools it doesn’t matter as much I guess but most people aren’t.
Even a full-featured TUI like Claude Code is highly limited compared to a visual UI. Conversation branching, selectively applying edits, flipping between files, all are things visual UI does fine that are extremely tedious in TUI.
Overall it comes down to the fact that people have to use TUI and that’s more important than it being easy to train, and there’s a reason we use websites and not terminals for rich applications these days.
I use headless mode (-p) and keep my named shell histories as journals (so no curses/TUI or GUI). But session management or branching could improve at the tool level and allow seamless integration with completion tools, which could be a simple fast AI looking at recent sessions or even be visual, say for navigating and extending a particular complex branch of a past session. It is not too hard to work with such shell-based flows within Emacs for me, but it would be nice if there was some standardization effort on the tool fronts and some additional care for future automation. I dont want my AI clicking buttons if it can be precise instead. And I certainly want multithreading. I think of AI more as an OS; it needs a shell more than it needs windows at this point in time.
all the examples for visual UI, are tasks which already are (or soon be) done by the agent, not human. hence not needed.
I suspect that final(*) UI is much more similar to TUI: being kind of conversational (human <> AI). Current GUIs provided by your bank/etc are much less effective/useful for us, comparing to conversation way: 'show/do me sth which I just need'. Not to mention (lack of) walled garden effect, and attention grabbing not in the user interest (popups, self-promo, nagging). Also if taking into account age factor. Also that we do not have to learn, yet another GUI (teach a new bank to your mom ;). So at least 4 distinct and important advantages for TUI.
My bet: TUI/conversation win (*).
*) there will be some UI where graphical information density is important (air controller?) especially in time critical environments. yet even there I suspect it's more like conversation with dynamic image/report/graph generated on the go. Not the UI per se.
It would be cool if I didn't have to worry about whether I was "in" or "out" of the AI TUI. Right now, I need at least two terminals open: One running my shell, that I use to issue shell commands, and one running Claude, where I can't. It would be nice if it could just be my shell, and when I wanted to invoke claude, I'd just type:
Right in the shell.isn't that what Simon Willison's `llm` does?
edit: [link](https://github.com/simonw/llm)
Most AI agents have a 'bash mode' and, you can use Warp terminal which is terminal first, but easy to activate the AI from the terminal. For example, if you mangle a jq command, it will use AI to suggest the right way to do it.
-p
Oh wow, nice. Does it remember context from run to run?
I agree. I like using Claude or Codex in VM on top of the tmux. Much more flexibility that way. I open a new tmux window for each issue/task big enough to warrant it, issue a prompt to create a worktree and agents and let them go to town. I actually use claude and codex a the same time. I still get observability because of tmux and I can close my laptop and let them cook for a while in yolo mode since the VM is frequently backed up in proxmox pbs. I am a retired hobbyist but this has been a nice force multiplier without devolving a complete viby mess. I hope these new orchestration tool support this like vs code remote development does. Same for cloud. I want them to support my personal "cloud" instead of laggy github mess.
> even with the help of AI.
This is what you get when you build with AI, an electron app with an input field.
Doesn't have to be. I just revived one of my C++ GLFW app from 2009. Codex was able to help me get it running again and added some nice new features.
I guess you get an Electron app if you don't prompt it otherwise. Probably because it's learned from what all the humans are putting out there these days.
That said.. unless you know better, it's going to keep happening. Even moreso when folks aren't learning the fundamentals anymore.
I've done way, way more than that, as I'm sure others have too.
This is just bad product management.
So where is all this amazing software that you and others built with AI?
All I see is hype blog posts and pre-IPO marketing by AI companies, not much being shipped though.
You won't see it because it's mostly personal software for personal computers.
I've got a medical doctor handwriting decipherer, a board game simulator that takes a PDF of the rulebooks as input and an accounting/budgeting software that can interface with my bank via email because my bank doesn't have an API.
None of that is of any use to you. If you happen to need a similar software, it will be easier for you to ask your own AI to make a custom one for you rather than adapt the ones I had my AI make for me.
Under the circumstances, I would feel bad shipping anything. My users would be legitimately better off just vibe coding their own versions.
I disagree. There is a tier of people who can't vibe code what you've vibe coded, but also might not trust your app (especially the bank one). There is still a real gap here to be filled by professional work or fakers.
Professionals are doing what I am doing, only inside companies. They make custom software that solves ultra-specific problems of that one company.
I don't quite understand the obsession with shipping fancy enterprise b2b saas solutions. That was the correct paradigm for back when developing custom code was expensive. Now it is cheap.
Why pay for Salesforce when you only use 1% of Salesforce's features? Just vibe code the 1% of features that you actually need, plus some custom parts to handle some cursed bespoke business logic that would be a pain in the ass to do in Salesforce anyway.
Let me know when Stacy from HR vibe codes her own salesforce alternative, sounds very cool!
Supposedly Richard Stallman's secretaries knew how to code their own Emacs macros.
I don't expect any LLM to empower people as much as Emacs can, but they will definitely empower more people in total, just because LLMs are easier to use than Emacs.
There is a guy on twitter documenting his progress with moltbot/openclaw: https://x.com/Austen/status/2018371289468072219. Apparently he has already registered his bot for an LLC so he can make money w/ it.
Some guy on Twitter selling an AI coding boot camp is an interesting example. Also it's literally just a post of him looking for a real developer to review his vibe coded bot???
What does the bootcamp have to do w/ anything? He is using AI slop to make money, that's all that matters in a socio-economic system wherein everyone & everything must make profits to persist. Edit: found another example from coinbase: https://x.com/0xEricBrown/status/2018082458143699035.
Edit: I'm not going to keep addressing your comment if you keep editing it. You asked for an example & I found two very easily. I am certain there are many others so at this point the onus is on you to figure out what exactly it is you are actually arguing.
Your first example is just a twitter post of a guy asking for a developer to review his vibe coded bot. Nothing shipped.
The second example is twitter post of a crypto bro asking people to build something using his crypto API. Nothing shipped.
Literally nothing shipped, just twitter posts of people selling a coding bootcamp and crypto.
You should make a note & revisit this in a few days to figure out whether your assessment was correct or not. I've already wasted enough time here so good luck.
quality takes time. I'm still in stealth
Their goal is to ship as fast as possible b/c they don't care about what you care about. Their objective is to gather as much data as possible & electron is good enough for that.
I work at OpenAI, and I get the concern. From our side, this was a careful tradeoff: Electron lets us iterate faster and makes it possible to bring the Codex app to Windows and Linux very soon. That doesn’t mean performance or UX don’t matter—we’re actively paying attention to both.
Would genuinely love your thoughts if you try it. Early users have been surprised by how native it feels!
Could you please pass on feedback to the team that the git diff view is very hard to read for red/green colourblind users like myself? Colour scheme like GitUp.co is very readable for me.
the problem is that getting this out in this shape the week after Cursor made $100M ARR would have made sense
getting it out now suggests there are structural problems about how decisions get made and code gets shipped—and the "iterate faster" line feels misplaced
I use Google's antigravity so I personally have no problem w/ electron applications. At the end of the day UI performance is not a bottleneck for me.
Aaaaand that is why we, as end users get machines which are sluggish, because literally every. Single. Application is taking this attitude.
Shock horror, the waste adds up, and it adds up extremely quickly.
I don't really care about memory or how much of it is taken up by the editor. I have enough memory for the work that I do & UI performance would make no difference to my workflow.
Your AI can’t make a UI for 3 platforms? Seems pretty worthless.
Claude code is perfectly capable of writing low level rendering and input code and it can be equally as mindless as vibe coding web apps.
E.g. just say "write a c++ gui widget library using dx11 and win32 and copy flutters layout philosophy, use harfbuzz for shaping, etc etc"
At the end of the day LLMs just reproduce the consensus of the internet, so it makes sense that a coding agent would spit out software that looks like most of what's on the internet.
LLM output is called slop for a reason.
It's baffling to me that people still throw around the word "native" like it means anything. Go use VSCode or Obsidian, then go use Apple Music. Electron can be so much better than anything native. The problem isn't that macos ChatGPT, Codex, or Claude isn't native. Their apps just really suck. They're poorly engineered and bad.
Apple Music isn't native either.
Oh right, I forgot, "native" just means "good". So if an app is bad, it can't be native, and if an electron app is actually good its because they're doing crazy optimizations that aren't feasible for mortal souls so don't even think about it. This is the "Hackers News Law of Application Nativeness".
What features are they missing that a native app would allow for?
No-one outside of a small sliver of the tech community cares if an app is built with web tech
Electron also opens up easier porting to Linux which almost certainly wouldn't happen if companies insist on native only
Users care about performance and jank, it’s just that they’ve been successfully forced to shut-up-and-deal-with-it. They’re not involved in purchasing or feedback, and the people that are don’t use it enough to care, or just don’t care. Users who complain about it may as well shout into the void for how much companies take note, but hey, at least we got an ai button now!
Atlassian products are a great example of this. Everyone knows Atlassian has garbage performance. Everyone complains about it. Never gets fixed though. Everyone I know could write customer complaints about its performance in every feedback box for a year, and the only thing that would happen is that we’d have wasted our own time.
Users _care_ about this stuff. They just aren’t empowered to feedback about it, or are trained to just sigh and put up with it.
I find outside of specific use cases the performance and jank are down to the developers and not whether it's native or not
Obsidian is an Electron app which is pretty much universally loved. We can both give single examples
i think you've to be more nuanced here - perf becomes important only on the extreme. i think there are compromises to be made between perf and go-to-market.
“They just aren’t empowered to feedback about it, or are trained to just sigh and put up with it” is a roundabout way of saying users don’t care about it enough.
Software decisions are often not made by who will use said software.
It's amazing to me that in the official Gemini app on Android, the hamburger menu on the left does not open on swipe - only if you click the hamburger button. A basic native UI interaction in the home screen of one of Google's flagship apps.
This is what happens when an entire generation of programmers doesn’t know how to write code in any language other than JavaScript or maybe Python.
How far from grace we have fallen :sob:
Desktop GUI is a lost art. Gen X were the last people to master it.
I am a gen X, this hurts, but it might be true :(
I used wxWidgets to build a native GUI for Windows + Mac 10+ years ago and implemented all GUI-drawing (it was an audio signal processor control software so included meters, faders, knobs, audio spectrum and I even incorporated Horde3D OpenGL interface for visualising an arena [sadly never fully finished to full potential as my modelling abilities in Blender simply wasn't good enough]). I wrote that, and another guy wrote the network library in C that sent signals to the network devices, and received them. I responded to the incoming network info to draw appropriate parts of the UI like meters/scopes at 50ms minimum.
The fact that we did this as a 1-man team for the GUI and that I can still compile it today (if I had the code) against wxWidgets, to then run on macOS and Windows simply shows the lazy nature of (most/all?) desktop apps by big companies these days.
I utterly detest using them, but it seems customers think an app that takes 5 seconds to launch with a spinning whirly wheel and horizontal gradient animation over list views for 5+ seconds before content is loaded is perfectly acceptable. Quality with a capital K!
Just jumping on the thread. I think the conversation is conflating two very different things:
1. Turing test UX's, where a chat app is the product and the feature (Electron is fine) 2. The class of things LLMs are good at that often do not need a UI, let alone a chat app, and need automation glue (Electron may cause friction)
Personally, I feel like we're jumping on capabilities and missing a much larger issue of permissioning and security.
In an API or MCP context, permissions may be scoped via tokens at the very least, but within an OS context, that boundary is not necessarily present. Once an agent can read and write files or executed commands as the logged in user, there's a level of trust and access that goes against most best practices.
This is probably a startup to be hatched, but it seems to me this space of getting agents to be scoped properly and stay in bounds, just like cursor has rules, would be a prereq before giving access to an OS at all.
Why should they? It's not like these apps will be around for long
The brief video OpenAI did sets the stage as I see it - for an evolving kind of engineer. Who will think and design as much as know code.
I feel like it's because of the way they are internally structured. They have some people who are machine learning trained on post-training, and other people who have nice product management resumes. The post-training people want more compute, well-formatted data, honestly more ways to try whatever technique of reinforcement learning they want.
The product people are building things, but OpenAI has literally been throwing stuff at the wall and it hasn't been sticking. They seem to be behind in terms of everything user interface. Canvas came after Anthropic had artifacts. Codex came after Anthropic had Claude Code.
Some of their researchers (okay one) have (has) stated they believe in interface work. That's because GUIs help engage the person beyond thought, and help the person work with more complexity (perception, physics, form, 3D). But they're playing catchup, or they're trying to incubate wins in science / math.
Why would widgets and buttons be better than a console, and or voice?
Because you see stuff before you decide what to invoke?
because not everything can be describe in code, language, or speech. if you're iterating on anything that requires refinement in terms of perception, you may need real time feedback.
Devex tooling is so much better in web, you can ship much faster, and speed to market matters more than making a native app. Apple dev tooling and build speed sucks a ton in comparison, and don't get started with windows
This is the reason. When an app changes so often, across different platforms, you don't want to support people lagging behind on old versions.
I'm not saying native is better or worse, but this will be why.
Is there any actual problem you have with the application? If not, who cares? Is this the 10 year old Electron is slow and bad meme being trotted out again?
> This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron.
That is not correct. One of the major selling points of Electron is precisely that you can call native APIs.
It is not that easy to build such app from scratch ... it all requires a lot of work, even with AI help. I think the most important is to provide easy to use UI first, and if speed or some missing features will be blockers for further innovation step then maybe native app will be at some point created.
use to have thoughts like that until I realize, electron help the cross platform and its really polished
AI has more training on web apps I think the real answer is that these guys are told they need to ship in 2 months and have a huge team of web devs
CLI > all Don't be a application peasant
Anthropic bought Bun and it's creator relentlessly optimizes Claude Code now.
So, there seems to be light.
Despite being an Electron app, it doesn't work on Intel macs...
What if they kept the 'good stuff' from us? Does that seem likely here?
Stating Unity, Unreal Engine and Blender as good examples of UI is a joke in itself, can't take comment seriously after that.
It’s less that and more - we’re still figuring out the best interface to use them.
For coding, interacting with the agent is best done via chat, especially if you’re trying to run teams of agents, then you’re not going to be looking at code all the time. The agent will summarize the changes, you will click on the diffs, approve them and move on. So it’s a very different experience from being the only one coding.
Edit:
Here’s a hot take -
A quick note on SwiftUI, it’s a piece of garbage that’s so hard to use that native devs despise it. So far no AI has been able to one shot it for me.
Blender most likely uses immediate mode - which is more resource intensive and less efficient than a stateful object oriented interface. But Zed uses a similar approach with (I think) success.
Then think about this, pre-AI, Google with all its billions, used web interfaces in all its desktop product GUIs :)
Apple, with all of its billions, created XCode which is inferior to every other IDE I have ever used. They still haven’t learned from Visual Studio. Microsoft is bad at a lot of things but developer tooling isn’t one of them.
All that to say, even if you knew what you wanted, taking that vision to reality is a difficult challenge. At least with AI, they could create a 100 different prototypes cheaply and pick the best direction based on that. That they should do, and they probably aren’t.
LLMs are trained on web slop, not engineering
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Unpopular opinion: why would you want a "native app"? On macOS, basically every app Apple makes themselves is worse in terms of design, usability, and performance than a popular Electron-based alternative.
For example, I tried opening a 200MB log file in Apple's Console.app and it hung. Opened right up in VS Code.
What is the superior Electron based alternative to Pixelmator Pro? Final Cut? Logic? Pages?