Ask HN: Why is web tech used to make apps?
- There are much better way to target multiple platforms while sharing code: Xamarin, React Native etc. (and not so good ones like QT/Swing and the like, I guess) - Apps made this way are not native to any of the platorms they run on - best case scenario they replicate platform UI and conventions poorly and with great effort, worst case they look nothing like native apps. Not as bad as Java does but close - HTML/CSS was never meant to be used to create UIs, they are meant to describe and style (hyper)text. It's a necessary evil when targeting browsers where there's no alternative, masochism otherwise - They are also slower and (much) more memory hungry than native apps - Slack happily eats 300+ megs of ram to do very little - They mean having to use JavaScript, instead of a better language with better tooling support - Many/most of the time the use case can be served by an actual web site/app - if you are making something that needs to connect to a database on a remote server to be of any use, why are you making an app to begin with?
Given the above downsides, why are Electron and the like so popular these days?
That really isn't true. Most mobile apps don't start out as web projects.
- Same technology - Reuse all or many code - Frontend people are easier to hire and cheaper