[cmiles74]

Slack and Spotify also have web applications that do essentially the same thing. I would be interested to know how many people download the Electron version but end up using the website more often, as this forces these apps to share the same runtime and puts some (meager) limits on CPU usage.

VS Code presents a good experience and it's resource usage is more reasonable, it's a good example of a successful Electron application. On the other hand, it has Microsoft behind it and there's probably good reasons why it's so much more performant than Atom, for instance. I am not convinced it's reasonable to expect all Electron applications to hit this relatively high bar in terms of quality.

In my opinion, Electron applications "stick out" as much as any other non-native application, this isn't an advantage to Electron. Indeed, I think Electron has proven that people aren't all that interested in a native application, as long as it's reasonably attractive and the interaction is fun. This could open the door for a new class of cross platform UI toolkit, one that drops the faux-native UI in favor of something simple, attractive and straightforward.

[tracker1]

I think that React-Native or similar combined with a control kit based on, for example Material Design could work very well. I know there's some effort from the Xamarin guys at MS towards this end. I also think that React-Native itself could become a better option for more platform-friendly implementations.