I actually think we have a competitive advantage here... developing native desktop apps is costly, and most commercial platforms don't bother these days (most you'll get just use a web client in Electron).

However I believe open-source makes it possible to sustain. You can already use native clients such as (the latest version of) Gajim with a Snikket server, but currently without the guarantee it's been tested and interoperable on every single feature... we'll get to that.