[dangus]

Ripcord itself demonstrates why Slack is written in Electron.

Is there a mobile app? Nope! Dead on arrival. In 2020, Slack or Teams or anything similar is literally useless without a mobile app.

Feature matrix says animated emojis will arrive "never." lol!

I remember the days of native chat clients like Skype and AIM. I remember how Linux and Mac platforms were basically half-clients compared to Windows. It sucked.

Electron applications like Slack and Spotify work everywhere, exactly the same. And if you think about it, that's why something like chat and music apps would prioritize ease of cross-platform deployment over perfect efficiency. They're not particularly demanding, and they are most valuable to people when they're ubiquitous. If Spotify isn't in every device I own it loses a great amount of value.

Nobody's sitting at their Activity Monitor staring at the RAM usage of Slack or Teams. In reality, performance is fine. It's just chat.

(Interestingly enough, I've never found a music application that skips tracks more quickly than Spotify, even for locally-stored music. It's just instant with no gaps.)

[xg15]

> Electron applications like Slack and Spotify work everywhere, exactly the same.

Yes, because they're just web pages. Then why not just use the browser to display them?

[dangus]

Nobody’s stopping you from using the web version of Slack or Spotify.

That said I can think of some pretty good reasons.

- Users don’t understand it as well or are less comfortable with it.

- Users’ general preference for logical separation

- Mobile safari doesn’t support browser notifications.

- You won’t get browser notifications if you close the tab by accident

- You lose OS integration, like replying via OS notifications in Slack or using OS Music controls with Spotify

On top of all that a browser tab uses plenty of RAM as well so I don’t really see the upside of using the browser for these apps, either.