This is definitely true. It seems to be the modern approach that the less effort in development, the better!

I too had code that worked across 3 platforms with wxwidgets and a 3D game toolkit incorporated in opengl for visualisation, with most 2d controls being drawn using wxwidgets OnPaint handlers for custom controls rendered natively on that platform. I wrote this single-handedly, with another colleague handling the network code and firmware on the remote hardware devices.

Everything else is sheer laziness as far as I am concerned. There's even less excuse today with the rise of LLMs to do the majority of UI coding for you.

Not a front end developer but I’ve always assumed it was ROI - nobody felt a smaller memory footprint would drive enough incremental revenue to offset the costs.

What seems to have changed is the size of the costs - LLMs are really good at this - such that you can now say “well, maybe the returns aren’t that big, in fact maybe they’re zero, but this is easy enough, so why not”

De minimus improvement has always suffered this problem - we’re all fairly sure it’s worth something, but not enough to pursue when it’s not cheap to fix.

> single codebase in Qt

Not if your promary UI is web.

Qt runs on web too.

Web version has 0 accessibility, which is a no-go for real products

[delayed]

Web discord is written in Qt??

> it's super easy (I did myself alone many times) to have a single codebase in Qt

I’ve worked in Qt apps on and off through my career.

I do not want Qt apps any more than I want Electron apps.

The solution is native apps using native platform tools, or one of the mature cross-platform toolkits.

Which cross-platform toolkits are more mature than Qt?

Mature was probably not the best word. The modern desktop UI toolkits produce a better UX to me.

Qt feels too locked in to old decisions that were the right choice at the time, but desktops and mobile have changed so much that it always feels like a clash of old and new.

You can make Qt look however you want. The point is that it will give you native UI by default (for the most part and excluding QML)

That native UI will be faster than Electron and most other retained UI toolkits and will be just as capable of creating whatever your subjective view of “modern UI” is.

I'm still waiting for a single Qt-based app on macOS that feels like a macOS app. They look more like some Windows 95-era app wearing the Aqua skin peeled off the carcass of some slightly older-and-definitely-not-current version of macOS.

Don't confuse UI and UX. You can make Qt have the right UI, you can't make it have the right UX.

This is also why electron and other frameworks really devalue MacOS. Back in the day anything not built with Cocoa felt off, there was a difference in usability.

Now we take it for granted, and Mac apps feel as good or bad as everywhere else.

Qt will look like AppKit. Because it is AppKit under the hood .

The person who made a Qt app may be designing it based off of cross platform UX but maybe you should follow your own advice and not conflate things.

You can make a native UI and UX with Qt. You can also make things feel very non native via AppKit too. Your argument has very little to do with the toolkit and more to do with the developers choices.

I'm with zapzupnz here.

I haven't seen what you describe, even if it's theoretically possible. I'd really love to be shown an example.

I'm not saying it can't happen, and in fact, if it existed I wouldn't have noticed (I mean, the point is that you think it's native, so I wouldn't have noticed..) but I can't think of an example and I would love to see one.

For every one C++ programmer, there are 10 JS programmers.

Unfortunately, as now we are stuck with JavaScript in all places.

I would understand if devs preferred to not bundle lots of libraries, so their mobile apps are faster and slimmer.

And yet most Android apps today take 50-100MB bundle size for very simple GUIs and take up lots of RAM and lots of time to load or react to anything.

So maybe we'd be better off with everyone bundling Qt after all.

Qt licensing is terrible for commercial products. You end up with an account manager that changes every year, compliance within your company is a chore. Qt is fine for things that are and always will be open source.