So I finally discovered why people are weirdly clamoring for a Mobile App: There is an apparent belief that Apps are more performant than websites.
My guy. My dude. Friendo. All of your apps are just shitty frames around an embedded web browser.
The fucking windows version of discord is all electron. Hit Ctrl shift I with discord open sometime.
all "desktop" apps are Like This nowadays and it drives us absolutely batshit actually! we miss native executables targeting the UI framework on our goddamn device!
There's a common joke that "Everything built since 2010 is just Chrome"
...it isn't a joke It literally basically is.
It's tragic and strange.
Being a coder who does computational math in java in luigi era year 8 feels absolutely surreal sometimes, but then again when I do frontend work it's, as the kids say, not cute, this is something I only do when I feel incredibly threatened
HTML + CSS is a lot better of a layout system than native APIs in a lot of ways. It's standard across platforms, it's nice and declarative, it's got massive amounts of accessibility features built right in. It saves a ton of dev toil not to have to write a custom native UI for every app on two separate OSes and the web, and it certainly makes it more feasible to use operating systems that aren't owned by evil megacorps. If Discord existed ten years ago it would absolutely not have had a Linux app.
It flows both ways, too. Because VSCode was implemented in Electron you can use it in a web browser for free, which is a term we programmers use to mean "a considerable amount of effort but way less than if you had to implement the whole thing from scratch". I don't even really like VSCode much as an editor but I sure use it a bunch because it lets me make some tweaks to a repo with syntax highlighting and shit in my browser, and I can even hook it up to a VM if I want to. That's rad! And it's directly possible because of Electron.
There's a lot to be said against Chromium and Blink becoming a browser monoculture, and I hope that Electron is just one step on a longer path. But the fact that you can open a dev inspector to see (and modify!) the internals of a desktop app is an unambiguously excellent thing.