It depends. How does Cocoa handle arthritic users?

It's not baby with the bathwater, the second you want something cross platform, your choices are electron or qt? Neither is that great of an option.

Common, customizable keyboard shortcuts & behaviors across the entire OS are huge for people with arthritis that can’t use a mouse, Automator workflows that hook in and take care of repetitive tasks are common and eventually Siri Shortcuts will be available on macOS like iOS.

Last year Voice Control: https://www.apple.com/macos/catalina/docs/Voice_Control_Tech... came out and is absolutely stunning and free with accessibility labels.

A custom UI would force them into “grid mode” on page 6 off the bat while it’s almost too easy if you just stay native, UI tests interact with the app through accessibility labels for example, and obviously we’re all testing, right?

Simply riding closely on the back of the behemoth that’s weirdly good about accessibility gets one very far, very fast.

Too bad this behemoth doesn't care about cross-platform.

Too bad disabled users don’t either.

Cross platform wasn’t even mentioned or implied in your original comment by the way, it was edited into the second one where you narrowed an “arthritic, farsighted Arabic speaking user” into “arthritic”.

It wasn't mentioned but that doesn't mean that I don't care about it.

I used to be very strongly in favor of cross-platform but I have come to realize that in a lot of cases that while it is true for us as developers that cross-platform is great because it means a bigger audience, it is easily worse for your users.

I’d rather pay $50 for a native macOS application that uses the UI toolkits offered by its platform and respects the conventions and the system as a whole, than to pay $5 for an application that allegedly does the same thing but which feels broken, sluggish and/or incoherent because its developers are making something cross-platform.

There are some exceptions to this – some developers do pull it off, and if what they make is both good quality and performant and the tool is offering something of exceptional value to me then I will use it. But in the general case, I will avoid the non-native experience.

All of that being said, I still think it is cool that people invest time in exploring making their own GUI frameworks. All I am saying is that it has a cost for the users a lot of the time.

It does, when one uses toolkits that wrap platform APIs.

The other choice is to share business logic, reimplement UI for each platform independently, using platform-specific APIs.

Cross-platform GUI always leads to compromise.

Yes, this is definitely the right approach for native apps.

I disagree.