[olliej]

“High fidelity” web apps, and their electron kin are pretty terrible at basic macOS tasks - they generally use non-Mac shortcuts, and lack many of the standard Mac-isms that make mac software pleasant (for Mac users - obviously matching windows behavior for windows users is fine).

To be completely clear: this isn’t just a “web apps being limited by the browser” issue, because the same problems exist in electron apps.

The core problem I think for new Mac apps is the market for apps that charge enough to cover dev costs has shrunk considerably.

The App Store model encourages software that is priced far too low to be cover costs unless you sell in sufficient quantities, but at the same time it’s created the idea that apps should be less than $10 even on non-mobile platforms. The result is that if you’re not a triple-A game with marketing to match you’re unlikely to be able to charge $60.

That means an indie dev needs to serve as many people as possible, as cheaply as possible. Whether Mac users like it or not that will in general mean things like electron or crummy iOS ports. Even apple’s own catalyst apps can be annoyingly buggy, what hope does an indie dev have?