This is true. We managed to wrap a very large portion of the desktop code base into a “portable” library (with some customization at the point the library hits the OS, e.g., file IO.) This library is compiled specifically for the OS it’s going to run on (iOS, Web) to give us the best performance we can muster.
The UI for each implementation is bespoke. This lets us build native interactions on the platforms we ship to, giving the end user the best look-and-feel for the platform they’re on. The flip side to this is development cost and time. In the long run, we believe it is worth it.
Rewriting Photoshop in Electron would have been infeasible and the performance hit a non-starter. The path we’ve taken has some trade offs to it, but is the right one given the legacy tech we have and what we want to do with it.
Windows 10, pulling in part of an engineering drawing from a PDF (so many thousands of objects).
To wit: I’m known on the team for sussing out information from corrupted PSDs, and get called on about once a quarter to look into a bad file that’s come in. That wouldn’t happen as frequently without the community site.
In many cases, it should also make perfect business sense to use PWAs. I've heard Adobe has brought a significant part of the Photoshop and Illustrator functionality into their web apps.