> And from what I can tell, neither are most developers. The Hacker News commentariat loves to bemoan the death of native apps. But given what a mess the Windows app platform is, I’ll pick the web stack any day, with Electron or Tauri to bridge down to the relevant Win32 APIs for OS integration.
Well yes as a user I prefer native apps for their performance. It's clearly a mess to develop native apps as the article shows. But as a user I don't see that problem. I do see ever worsening apps though. Like the total mess that is new outlook and teams.
That’s ironic given that the new Outlook and Teams are a mess because they are web apps instead of native apps.
Web apps cause have lots of trouble emulating proper native look and feel and often have wierd issues with things like consistent focus and keystroke navigation. They have all the dumb issues of Java apps with no improvements beyond not being Java and are slower and more memory heavy to boot!
Microsoft has always stood for mediocre quality software so that's no surprise.
Also, they stopped caring about Windows because they want recurring service revenue. Making Windows a subscription service for consumers would outrage the users (even though they kinda already do this for business with Microsoft 365). So the consumer market is just viewed as a billboard for M365 and Copilot. So everything you see there is just lowball effort, even worse than their normal quality.
It's demonstrably possible. And further, why does what some portion of Microsoft, a huge, multi-headed beast, does qualify as the bar for what is reasonable for users to expect?
This, and add to that the fact that web apps make it trivial for the dev to just randomly change the GUI out from under me without my consent or ability to prevent it, and, well, wonder why I and so many others dislike them? I want to be able to refuse app updates, thank you very much.
A question - Which portion of Microsoft, the multi-headed beast develops pure-native apps now ? Even the Windows 11 Settings app is Javascript.
The multi-headed beast has been assimilated by web-tech. They can't code GUI C++ no more - except their compiler/graphics team. And even the latter are dying.
Id be interested in a source for both this and the parent's comment. How do we know which settings pages use which tech? Have people been decompiling them?
Yeah exactly, on Linux I mostly use Qt apps and they're great. Even Telegram is native. The only one that I use that isn't is Obsidian. But all these notetaking apps are electron (and markdown) somehow.
Considering people are leaving Windows in part because Microsoft is shoving web slop into it, perhaps other devs should learn the lesson that it's not acceptable to use web frameworks on the desktop.
Well yes as a user I prefer native apps for their performance. It's clearly a mess to develop native apps as the article shows. But as a user I don't see that problem. I do see ever worsening apps though. Like the total mess that is new outlook and teams.