The only native toolkit I've ever tried that I thought could compete with web is wpf. It was slow and cludgy but way ahead of its time, and the web is only now starting to approach its power.

I think WPF is nice but has actually fallen behind a bit on binding vs. some of the web toolkits like React/Redux, Angular 2, Ember.

It's been a while since I messed with it, but MVVM didn't work so well for some kinds of things, which seemed to be why for example selected items property is often not a dependency property of MS supplied widgets (so can't be participate in binding). For example see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22868445/wpf-binding-sele... (from what I remember this accepted solution also has a subtle bug of double notification (or was it lack of notification on one side?)).

Perhaps WPF was the Electron of its time, in terms of being a resource hog. I remember how one particular WPF-based application hastened the obsolescence of my brother's laptop some years ago. [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8444494

I can't see how Cocoa failed at anything.

> I can't see how Cocoa failed at anything.

Will my Cocoa app run on Windows, Linux and the web?

(A well-designed web app built with Electron will).

Why should any company that wants their product to be widely available invest in Cocoa developers?

Why should it? It focuses on its platform and does it well.

I prefer native Mac apps to cross-platform ones. Serious companies should build native apps and keep UX guidelines of each platform in mind.

Building an app once for each platform is not economically viable for a lot of teams, 'serious' or otherwise.

Yes, but it's not Cocoa's problem.

It's Cocoa's problem because people stop using it for that reason. A toolkit no-one uses is a failure.

It's doing well - I currently have 2 Electron apps and dozens of Cocoa apps on my Mac. :)

We're talking about dev mindshare today. What you have installed is irrelevant.

I bet that 20-25% of desktop apps on Mac will use Electron in the next 5-7 years.