Re:Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
by Touche on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @02:51PM
(#14091189)
Making desktop apps might be a nice lifestyle business for niche segments, but there aren't many (any?) big businesses built on desktop apps any more. Microsoft and Adobe are doing well on the desktop, churning out new versions of apps they've been building for nearly 30 years, but I can't think of any company built in the last 10 years (at least) that came up that way.
In the meantime, here's one of those "web-based unicorns" you so despise: https://www.google.com/finance?q=amazon&ei=viTtWMGfNMWQ2Aa42...
Re:Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
by overgard on Tuesday April 11, 2017 @05:17PM
(#14092528)
If you can't think of any companies that have built significant desktop apps recently, you're just not looking. I don't even get how this is an argument. "Well I haven't personally installed a native app recently, so obviously they're unimportant."
You know what's never going to go out of fashion? Performance. Especially since CPU speeds have stalled in the last decade. you will never get good performance if your design is: "embed an entire browser, and then use a small piece of it"
A higher barrier to entry has that effect. Low quality crap doesn't get in as easily.
>Nobody in the last 5-10 years cared about writing Desktop apps before Electron came along, there's basically zero money in it, and it's massively expensive, both in terms of actual dev time per feature (easily 10x the cost), and also in finding specialist developers who know these dated technologies.
I find this argument absurd. Desktop (and mobile native) apps are multi-tens of billion business. Ask Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and thousands upon thousands of smaller businesses (down to SMEs like Panic and one-man-shops like Sublime Text).
If anything it's those web-based unicorns that are either merely burning VC money, or selling the user to advertisers -- in both cases, there are not much money in selling them directly.
And there's nothing about web development that couldn't be achieved just as easily if instead of all those money on browser engines and teams to create things like Dart, there was some effort towards a nice, cross platform, mobile and desktop UI library.
It could even have JS bindings for all web devs to use -- just without the web stack crap. React Native is something akin to that, but imagine if it had been going for years, and had more industry support, instead of the nth attempt to put lipstick on the web stack.