I imagine the first step would be for them to make a cross platform UI framework that's better than any existing options, and then port claude to it.

Making five different apps just to claim "native" doesn't seem like a great choice, and obviously for now, delivering new claude features takes priority over a native graphics framework, so electron makes sense. But that doesn't mean it'll be on electron forever.

When I complain about a lack of “native” software I pretty much always mean the platform-provided defaults. Not some cross-plaform UI toolkit that happens to be “native” code. Most apps that I see using QT on Mac or whatever would provably be better as Tauri apps.

Respectfully: skill issue. My employer ships software native for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. Different codebases for all (though they share a lot of common stuff), all maintained by a shockingly small team.

It’s absolutely achievable if you give a shit about your products and I’m long over hearing the bevy of usual fucking excuses from software houses often magnitudes larger than us who struggle to even keep their electron shit working correctly.

Native is shorthand for "integrated into the platform". Lowest-common-denominator stuff that Electron gives feels correct nowhere (looking at you, Slack). The very best cross-platform applications implement their UI using the native platform idioms on the native platform technologies, and share the core of their logic. The current best example I have is Ghostty which feels perfectly at home on either macOS or Linux.