i think everyone i've ever seen say "just make a native app" has been a windows user, i.e. someone who can safely take for granted that a native app would actually target their platform
how would your opinions on electron change if your options were "electron thing" and "thing that probably only runs on linux"?
imagine a world of all native apps. oops, you can't use your bank with this new phone! or this new laptop! linux users utterly disenfranchised. heck, even macs would be in a wildly different position right now.
chromium has its problems, and i hate google as much as the next person on cohost, but electron is solving a very real engineering problem right now. yes, i would prefer to see desktop operating systems invest in progressive web apps so we can phase at electron. but until then, this is what we get. the incentives for developing a native app are basically nonexistent for most companies. nerds can cry about it, but only nerds know enough to really care what UI system underlies the apps they're using.
my opinion is that electron sucks but its basically the best easy thing we have rn besides websites (Which dont work for a lot of things) so we might as well use it while working on something next thats better
In my of brain think contemplate out the of my opinion.
The thing with native apps is, unless they're designed and individually implemented with the specific libraries and design languages which pertain to the given target OS, they just end up feeling off in little (and sometimes big) ways, maybe on all supported operating systems. Have you ever used an app GUI programmed with Java's standard windowing libraries, especially if you're on a Mac? It just doesn't feel right! We've had tons of libraries for coding cross-platform UIs for many, many years, and they're all extremely commendable efforts, but none will ever meet the specialized polish of native apps because they aren't specialized. You're not making a Windows UI or a Mac UI when you use a common library, you're making a cross-platform UI.
So with that in mind, Electron doesn't serve to replace or succeed native apps. Electron succeeds cross-platform libraries by bringing the extremely specific and open standards of the web to the desktop. Apps made in Electron still don't quite feel like native apps, but they do generally put up a more convincing facade, since Chromium is mostly quite well tuned for whatever OS it runs on. The language for web design, HTML and CSS (and arguably various JavaScript frameworks as well as JS, DOM, and other web APIs themselves), are well specified and very powerful, so apps are generally not restrained by the technology they can access.
On its own, this is an abundantly good thing for cross-platform desktop (nowadays even mobile!) development. Web standards are open standards, so generally speaking, in areas where capability is lacking, it's a much more inclusive process moving forward. There's a very active online realm of people coding UI libraries and JavaScript frameworks which make developing robust cross-platform apps distinctly more accessible than it was 10 or 15 years ago โ not to mention a vast collection of tutorials online, and a generally high standard of documentation for the popular libraries and toolings. It's tricky to wrap your head around how much improved cross-platform development is from Yon Olden Days.
Electron has its share of issues as well โ most obviously it being a major resource hog on older devices, and web developers tend to have a narrow if not elite perspective on what counts as "newer"; plus myriad social issues and the inherent problematics in centralizing a whole field of development โ and while those are absolutely worth addressing, criticizing, and working to improve, it's also worth recognizing how different a landscape cross-platform application development is compared to not so long ago. Where we we're at now is by no means perfect, but many of the changes have been genuine positives, and it's worth recognizing that so we understand where we come from and where we have the choice to go in the future.
