All this sounds great from the perspective of retail shrink wrap software. Today, the major use cases for Qt on the desktop are in-house corporate software. And, no one cares about "uncanny valley". Only HN and online nerds care about that stuff. Average, non-technical, corporate users care about functions, not form. Hell, they are happy with a VBA app! Also, lots of in-car and in-seat (aeroplane) entertainment systems are built in Qt.

    If you want a "Premium" native look and feel

Who is doing this in 2023? No one outside my examples above.

There's a reason in-house corporate software started becoming web based 15-or-so years ago: web is cheaper, easier to hire for, faster to develop and deploy, doesn't require installation or updates, easier to troubleshoot, doesn't need special pipes for communicating with the server (yeah I remember the days of DCOM, CORBA, WCF and other weird protocols instead of HTTP).

It is things like Qt that only HN and online nerds care about.

Don't get me wrong: I really like well made native apps and I think they're great. But Qt isn't as great as software made with native toolkits directly.

No, long term, web apps are more expensive because the front end needs to be completely re-written ever few years. A desktop app written in Qt can be kept running for a decade with very little work. (This assumes no Qt library upgrades, which for in-house apps, are most unnecessary.)

The primary advantage of web apps is "zero install", which is a major point of friction at large corps.

“because the front end needs to be completely re-written ever few years”

Citation needed. Currently working in a jQuery+Coffeescript app that still works like a charm.

> ...needs to be completely re-written ever few years.

No it doesn't, the HTML spec hasn't changed, whereas QT has. The issue is how the webapps were built in the first place. You don't need Nextjs and all it's friends to post a form to a backend once an hour but somehow that is becoming the standard approach...

> Who is doing this in 2023? No one outside my examples above.

For macOS check apps made by Apple (Logic, Final Cut), Panic, Rogue Amoeba, or apps like Pixelmator, Affinity, Pixelmator, TablePlus, Tower, Dash... there's more.

There's even open source ones like IINA providing a premium look+feel.

Qt has uncanney valley... do you think people using HTML care to make things look native then?

HTML doesn't suffer from the uncanny valley problem because it doesn't look native at all, it's just something totally different. Yeah, sometimes it sucks, but it's not because it looks "almost but not quite there".

Perhaps Cordova/Ionic, when it tried to imitate the look iOS/Android's native controls.

> If you want a "Premium" native look and feel, people gotta go directly to the source: native APIs.

I've seen this regurgitated a hundred times, but I don't really know any more what that "native look and feel" is. On Windows, it might be the old Windows 95 controls, but those are quite limited. What system today is made of dropdowns, checkboxes and OK buttons?

Well, yeah. Windows is... special. Even Microsoft stopped using the normal controls. But the problem is that Qt looks like an uncanny valley version of this.

But by Premium yeah, I'm talking more about macOS, iOS and Android here.

For macOS apps made by Apple, Panic, Rogue Amoeba, or apps like Pixelmator, Affinity, Pixelmator, TablePlus, Tower, Dash.

According to Microsoft, native look and feel includes tiny tiny dialog boxes with even smaller panes inside that can't be resized, so yeah, not going to bother with that