Electron and the Decline of Native Apps
Electron is a stop gap solution on a path away from natively compiled applications against the proprietary UI frameworks that come with mac or windows or any of the complex matrix of UI toolkits, window managers and other crap that essentially cause Linux to be a perpetually inconsistent UX nightmare. That stuff is increasingly less relevant for new applications.<p>For what it is worth, developers are voting with their feet and have been for quite some time. Native development is rarely worth the trouble any more. Native development is tedious and expensive and you have to repeat the effort across different platforms for desktops and mobile. It&#x27;s been a long time since I came across job vacancies for desktop UI development. This stopped being a thing as soon as browsers started running Ajax applications.<p>The problems with Electron are mainly related to performance, which could be described as adequate for a lot of stuff but typically not great. That&#x27;s a solvable problem though. Actually Electron as a run time is basically a short term solution to ensure web applications have somewhere to run that isn&#x27;t a web browser. As web browsers evolve to support PWAs, the need for bundling separate things like Electron goes away. The real progress is continual improvements related to things like wasm, low level browser rendering optimizations, etc.<p>These days most normal users do most interesting stuff on a computer via web apps. E.g. Office 365 can be used in a browser. There&#x27;s no native app for Google docs at all and many people happily read their email in a web browser. Popular applications like spotify, slack, skype, etc. are all glorified web applications either running on electron or something similar. Increasingly it&#x27;s the native apps that look dated and out of place. On mobile especially, a lot that passes for native is in fact running mostly in web views. It&#x27;s more about the packaging, appstore presence, and access to system services than it is about using the right UI toolkits.