Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord just showed why

Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by franga2000 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @03:25AM (#50411399)

Have you used Kotlin Multiplatform? I currently am and while it sounds great, it's nowhere near ready. Something as simple as scanning a QR code has been a week-long project - the Kotlin-only libraries suck, the Java ones don't work on iOS, the only Kotlin Multiplatform one pulled in 500 MB of dependencies (that's final app size, not development files!!).

There was legit a point where I considered embedding a webview just for the QR code scanning screen, but of course, embedding a webview turned out to be a similar mess.

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by pindab0ter on Sunday November 08, 2026 @04:01AM (#50411546)

I am not very familiar with Kotlin Multiplatform, but couldn't you use a Swift/Objective C library for iOS, while using a Kotlin library for Android? What would be the blocker to this?

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Re:Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord ju... by franga2000 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @05:32AM (#50412006)

There's no blocker, but that's not a comparable development experience to more mature cross-platform toolkits.

I now have a separate QR scanning implementation for three platforms and a bunch of if statements in the Gradle files. It took 4x as much effort (once for each platform, plus the work to tie it all together) and now I also need to know how to develop for those platforms, which is exactly what I wanted to avoid by picking a cross-platform toolkit.

This will hopefully improve with time, as it did with RN and Flutter, but my point is that we're simply not there yet.

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