Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by drinchev 3206 days ago
I think choosing a hybrid approach is the way to go here.

The implementation with Electron, as most cases, sucks.

I work with a startup and they have a hybrid app, which binary is 3.5 megabytes [1]. UI is JS/HTML/CSS and is almost the same bundle as the web version [2]

Trello's app is 66MB [3]

1: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ninox-database/id901110441?m...

2: https://app.ninoxdb.de

3: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/trello/id1278508951?mt=12

2 comments

How does the "hybrid approach" differ from Electron and why is it so much smaller? Don't they still need to embed a full browser engine if the UI is all JS and HTML?
macOS offers WKWebView [1], which essentially uses internal webkit ( safari ) for running the application.

And since all libraries are already on your OS, the build is really small, as well as the memory footprint.

1: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/wkwebview

Slack used to use WebKit but they migrated to Electron for various reasons explained in their blog post https://slack.engineering/building-hybrid-applications-with-...
You have no Linux or Windows support though, right?