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Apple’s Liquid Glass just annoyed everyone I’ve heard comment on it, and, fwiw, YouTube Music asking if it feels outdated is an unnecessary annoyance.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.