Slack for example is 192 MB. I guess if everyone had that theory I might have 30 extra copies 6 extra gigabytes. More importantly I would have to ensure I killed apps lest say a calculator app or editor ruin my battery life by itself for the dubious privilege of rendering a blinking cursor.

Like I said it's a tradeoff.

For you, it sounds like it hurts more than it helps, but for others the options may be:

1. Don't use slack at all because they can't figure out how to install the correct version of libthingy.dll. Or they don't get the app at all because it's not for their platform.

2. Use slack

And in that scenario, the option they went with wins hands down.

I'm not saying it's perfect, and I still believe that giving both options would be a benefit for most, but the fact that it is done this way wasn't a "mistake", it was a tradeoff for the targeted audience solving problems that many had.

You're not really being fair here. You could just as well distribute all needed dll's with the app. In fact, that's pretty much what Electron does.

Why not ship an installer that checks for and appropriately installs DLLs?

Doesn't sound that bad on desktop. The binaries for Qt or the java JVM are not small either.

I suppose it's a problem on mobile though.

Hmmm.

Qt programs are pretty small. Java are bigger but still much much smaller than any Electron-based program.

IIRC JRE is about 50 MB. Probably less. So even if you include it with your Java program, it's STILL smaller than Electron programs.