Going native
Postman founder here HN folks. Great to see the post get featured on the homepage! Lots of discussion about what is exactly native. I have posted some replies but some other points about the choice of words:<p>1. Postman has 3 million users and about 1.5 million MAUs. When we tell people we have a native app, they get it. People go to our apps page, download the installer and see everything exactly as they expect things to be.<p>2. We have worked hard on optimizing our UI layer over the past several months including mapping of keyboard shortcuts and smoothening out performance issues.<p>3. We are able to provide a consistent experience for Windows, Linux and macOS users and people love that EVERYONE in the team can use the same app. That has very clear advantages when development teams are chosing tools. Postman is used by everyone who comes in touch with APIs - product managers, sales, customer support, dev evangelists and a cross-platform app allows everyone to standardize much faster.<p>4. Reusability in the code base through node packages is amazing to have.<p>5. We use React and are aiming for reusability of these components in the browser. This includes stuff like visualizations, data rendering etc. Our time to market has come down like crazy.<p>6. With node, not only do we get reusability across OSes but also between the app and our server-side stuff. We have a command line tool called newman that uses the same runtime (postman-runtime, open-sourced on Github) and the same runtime powers our monitoring service that runs on the cloud.<p>That's just some of the advantages. There is a lot of work going on in optimizing our code base. Ultimately we are validated by whether we do a good job for people who use the application. I have been building Postman over the past 5 years now and that has been the core guiding princple.