They use like 5 widgets (styled text, textfield, buttons, radios, etc). They could create their own UI toolkit with 1/10 the resources they have.

If this is true, then why are even bigger players with more resources like Facebook and Microsoft building on top of Electron instead of building natively?

I surmise that you are not alone in believing that Slack would be better built as a native app. But if it's such a bad direction why are so many going down this road and what are they missing?

>If this is true, then why are even bigger players with more resources like Facebook and Microsoft building on top of Electron instead of building natively?

Because software is a pop culture, and the latest fad always prevails at most shops. Also companies care more about cutting corners and shipping sooner than about the long haul.

That said, it's not like Facebook particularly enjoyed web based apps: "Mark Zuckerberg: Our Biggest Mistake Was Betting Too Much On HTML5"

https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-bigges...

The mistake there was one of timing and approach and they learned from it. The promise of cross-platform, web-based technology is still there, that's why they created React Native.

React Native is not web-based. It just uses Javascript.

The technology originated from web. It uses javascript, React, babel, flexbox, etc.

> ....Facebook and Microsoft building on top of Electron instead of building natively?

JavaScript devs are usually cheaper to hire than C++, Java, Objective-C, Swift, .NET ones.

I think VSCode by Microsoft is a good example of Electron done well.

In their case, I don't think it's because their web technology devs are cheaper. I wouldn't be surprised if that team knew multiple platforms and languages. I think it's all about finding the balance between dev costs, making a great product, and getting it out fast on multiple platforms.

On their case, they want to get a few notches up in the SV popchart culture, top of the pops.

Being cool in SV is only so valuable.

Apparently for the web dev generation, writing modular native code across OSes is a lost art, attained by us old druids not worth listening to.

Yeah, and it's especially puzzling since they've given up one of the major hassles of going natively cross-platform anyway: having to support a native look and feel.

Which makes creating a similar (uniform looking across platforms) native UI lib even easier than catering to the intricacies of each platform.