There's a big chart here:
By Look I mean The ability to create advanced UI which are not influenced by the Desktop native theme (as are all successful end user oriented applications). The ability to create a native app which is at least beautiful as modern WebApps.
e.g. Slack or VS Code (Electron) are beautiful, while fractal or notecase (gtk) are not.
That is a very debatable assumption. The large majority of apps I use use the desktop's native theme.
I'm a dev/technical user, in the key audience for native look & feel powertools, yet the main apps I use on Mac are still Chrome, Spotify, Slack, VS Code. None of these use the desktop's native theme.
Imagine the case for non-technical users.
Average users expect apps to have a custom look and feel. Ever tried SnapChat?
... no
> Imagine the case for non-technical users.
Most non-technical users I know - elderly couples, family, etc don't even install apps, they just use what their OS gives them. I don't know any who does not have VLC or LibreOffice however (but that may be a french thing)
The discussion here is really about average users, and the baseline assumption here is that we are talking about apps that don't come with the OS, that we'd install, since we're devs, creating new stuff.
> I don't know any who does not have VLC or LibreOffice however [...] (but that may be a french thing)
It's a French or power-user thing.
I was about to say "you know that the median mobile-device user has one third-party app installed, right?" but then I thought better and Googled it first. This used to be true, but the stat is far out-of-date; nowadays the median mobile-device user has 40-to-80 apps!
I'm kind of shocked how much user behavior has changed, honestly.
And I also thought about Snapchat as a reference for end user application.
Certainly because it's a model of simplicity and is really far from native themes.
Who are 'people' here? The strawman here is that 'average users' do not expect native theme.
If you ask most people, they probably won't know to identify this as a desirable trait, but what they do know is that if they launch a non-native app it will likely not look or behave according to their expectations. For example, I'm an expert user and even I'm still tripped up by the fact that Slack has a rather anemic menubar, and Discourse's is even worse.
Windows, Linux and Android users have no such expectations. In fact, in the case of Android, a non-native look and feel could be considered a positive thing since the native android look and feel is kind of terrible.
Or because they are unaware that there are native apps available, just from third parties. For example: https://volt-app.com/
What? In my dictionary, screenshots of "modern webapps" appear when I search the definition of the word "ugly".
[0]: https://stripe.com [1]: https://www.figma.com
I don't consider this desirable or even a reasonable criterion. I want my desktop apps to all use the same toolkit and look consistent. Unless you make a bog-simple app, something like Electron is never going to give you that. With Qt/Gtk/etc. you can certainly make custom widgets if you have special-purpose needs. For someone who comes from a web development background, there's going to be a learning curve for that, of course. But experienced Qt/Gtk developers should not find it meaningfully more difficult.
> e.g. Slack or VS Code (Electron) are beautiful, while fractal or notecase (gtk) are not.
That's incredibly subjective, and I don't agree with it. I think Slack and VS Code are fine looking apps, but I wouldn't rate them meaningfully higher than all the Gtk apps running on my desktop right now. (And regardless, I value consistency over some ill-defined measure of "beauty" when it comes to UI.)
Finally, one big point that is not mentioned is accessibility. If most browser handle accessibility very nicely with the basic HTML components, if you start to do anything remotely advanced you gonna have to be careful and correctly implement ARIA norm, which most don't. Native UI framework are not perfect either, but can behave better in a lot of cases (it's not a clear cut though).
Electron or local-server + webapp is really nice. Having done front end development as well has "native" application (with Qt), I can really appreciate how easier it is do to custom components using web technology, but I think we tend to dismiss their disadvantages too quickly.