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
It baffles me how much the discourse over native apps rarely takes this into consideration.

You reduce development effort by a third, it is ok to debate whether a company so big should invest into a better product anyway but it is pretty clear why they are doing this

>>gbaldu+rb2
That might be true (although you do add in the mess of web frameworks), but I strongly believe that resource usage must factor into these calculations too. It's a net negative to end users if you can develop an app a bit quicker but require the end users to have multiple more times RAM, CPU, etc.

>>SPICLK+WF2
Especially given how fast things progress, timeline and performance are a tradeoff where I'd say swaying things in favour of the latter is not per definition net positive.

>>icoder+XN2
There's another benefit - you don't have to keep refactoring to keep up with "progress"!

>>SPICLK+4Z2
Of course you do!

Microsoft makes a new UI framework every couple of years, liquid glass from apple and gnome has a new gtk version every so often.

>>ioasun+lJ3
Microsoft gets largely pilloried on every UI rethink, Apple’s Liquid Glass just annoyed everyone I’ve heard comment on it, and, fwiw, YouTube Music asking if it feels outdated is an unnecessary annoyance.