> And from what I can tell, neither are most developers. The Hacker News commentariat loves to bemoan the death of native apps. But given what a mess the Windows app platform is, I’ll pick the web stack any day, with Electron or Tauri to bridge down to the relevant Win32 APIs for OS integration.

Well yes as a user I prefer native apps for their performance. It's clearly a mess to develop native apps as the article shows. But as a user I don't see that problem. I do see ever worsening apps though. Like the total mess that is new outlook and teams.

▲

NetMageSCW 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That’s ironic given that the new Outlook and Teams are a mess because they are web apps instead of native apps.

Web apps cause have lots of trouble emulating proper native look and feel and often have wierd issues with things like consistent focus and keystroke navigation. They have all the dumb issues of Java apps with no improvements beyond not being Java and are slower and more memory heavy to boot!

▲

hu3 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Speaking about Electron, for my own little tools I have been using TypeScript+Bun with Electrobun.

https://github.com/blackboardsh/electrobun

	▲	runjake 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is neat! I clicked through about 10 app examples on that page and none of them had a screenshot of the app! It's a grave sin to have an app repo without a screenshot in the main README.md. Note: Yes, I know that electrobun itself has videos on the README.md

▲

aaomidi 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

When Microsoft themselves use electron to develop apps what expectations can we have on other devs?

▲

wolvoleo 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Microsoft has always stood for mediocre quality software so that's no surprise.

Also, they stopped caring about Windows because they want recurring service revenue. Making Windows a subscription service for consumers would outrage the users (even though they kinda already do this for business with Microsoft 365). So the consumer market is just viewed as a billboard for M365 and Copilot. So everything you see there is just lowball effort, even worse than their normal quality.

▲

Sindisil 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To do better?

It's demonstrably possible. And further, why does what some portion of Microsoft, a huge, multi-headed beast, does qualify as the bar for what is reasonable for users to expect?

▲

ethin 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This, and add to that the fact that web apps make it trivial for the dev to just randomly change the GUI out from under me without my consent or ability to prevent it, and, well, wonder why I and so many others dislike them? I want to be able to refuse app updates, thank you very much.

▲

lenkite 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A question - Which portion of Microsoft, the multi-headed beast develops pure-native apps now ? Even the Windows 11 Settings app is Javascript.

The multi-headed beast has been assimilated by web-tech. They can't code GUI C++ no more - except their compiler/graphics team. And even the latter are dying.

	▲	contextfree 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There are like three settings pages that use JavaScript and React Native, the vast majority of Settings is C++ and XAML/WinUI2

▲

aaomidi 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As a user Microsoft is windows and windows is Microsoft.

If doing native apps was realistic then I’d expect windows, Microsoft, etc to also do them.

▲

bigstrat2003 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Considering people are leaving Windows in part because Microsoft is shoving web slop into it, perhaps other devs should learn the lesson that it's not acceptable to use web frameworks on the desktop.

▲

DANmode 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To decide what tools are the right job for each project,

same expectation as always.

So many “let’s race-to-the-bottom along with the authority” comments on HN lately.

Dude: no! =]