zlacker

>>meetpa+(OP)
It is baffling how these AI companies, with billions of dollars, cannot build native applications, even with the help of AI. From a UI perspective, these are mostly just chat apps, which are not particularly difficult to code from scratch. Before the usual excuses come about how it is impossible to build a custom UI, consider software that is orders of magnitude more complex, such as raddbg, 10x, Superluminal, Blender, Godot, Unity, and UE5, or any video game with a UI. On top of that, programs like Claude Cowork or Codex should, by design, integrate as deeply with the OS as possible. This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron.

>>Olympi+EJ
>This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron.

Who told you that? You can write entire C libraries and call them from Electron just fine. Browser is a native application after all. All this "native applications" debate boils down to the UI implementation strategy. Maintaining three separate UI stacks (WinUI, SwiftUI, GTK/Qt) is dramatically more expensive and slower to iterate on than a single web-based UI with shared logic

We already have three major OSes, all doing things differently. The browsers, on the other hand, use the same language, same rendering model, same layout system, and same accessibility layer everywhere, which is a massive abstraction win.

You don't casually give up massive abstraction wins just to say "it's native". If "just build it natively" were actually easier, faster, or cheaper at scale, everyone would do just that.

>>gloosx+I92
React Native is able to build abstractions on top of both Android and iOS that uses native UI. Microsoft even have a package for doing a "React Native" for Windows: https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-windows

It's weird that we don't have a unified "React Native Desktop" that would build upon the react-native-windows package and add similar backends for MacOS and Linux. That way we could be building native apps while keeping the stuff developers like from React.

>>thekna+7t2
React Native desktop on Linux isn't a thing, the GTK backend is abandonned.

So if you want a multiplatform desktop app also supporting Linux, React Native isn't going to cut it.