[Mister_Snuggles]

It disappoints me as well.

Electron apps don't appear to play nice with the underlying API.

Take Spotify and Slack, for example. It makes sense that it should expose its API via AppleScript (on Mac), COM (on Windows), and DBUS (on Linux). These let you do neat things like, for example, use a PowerShell (or bash or AppleScript) script to update your Slack status to the name of the track that's playing.

Whether you'd WANT that specific functionality or not is beside the point, the fact that the functionality exists means that people will do cool things with it. More importantly, it means that people will do things the developer never thought of.

[jszymborski]

Except, the underlying backend of an electron app is a local node.js server. It's not only easy to open up a local API for an Electron app, it's platform independent.

[Mister_Snuggles]

Platform independence is nice, but generally that means it plays poorly on every platform.

Looking at Atom's API docs, for example, tells me that there's a very rich API that doesn't appear to be exposed in any way that's native to the underlying platform.