[Semaphor]

When almost every app sucks, I feel like it’s at least partially a platform issue.

(Disclaimer: I actually have RAM to spare, in constrained environments the situation might be different)

VS Code is pretty much the only larger electron app I think is very well done. Discord is pretty good, but then it starts going downhill. MS Teams is mostly responsive, bottom-of-the-barrel apps like postman feel like you are on a thin client remoting over a slow internet connection. And most electron apps sit between Teams and Postman.

[rodw]

Many Electron apps literally are a wrapped or packaged version of some SPA-style web interface, and the UX reflects that, naturally.

But - beyond the base Chromium "footprint", which to be fair isn't negligible - you absolutely _can_ build high-performance, resource-conserving (and not degrading-over-time) applications with Electron.

It probably can't quite match the fully native UX or performance, but with a little care you can definitely get close enough (especially given how common actual web/browser-based apps are anyway). The trouble is Electron is already a "lazy" way to build desktop apps, so many teams probably don't give it the level of care it requires or deserves.

Disclaimer of my own: I maintain a media-rich, processing-intensive and performance-sensitive Electron-based app, so I may be defensive (or arguably informed) about the performance. But I can also consistently achieve 40 to 60 FPS rendering of dynamic graphics (full-screen) and audio (multi-channel) simultaneous with non-trivial, near-real-time input signal processing, on typical hardware, across platforms, just using Electron and standard web APIs. (And I'm just some guy working solo. A larger or more capable team would probably do it better.) The rest of the app's UI/UX is noticeably not native, but that's probably (but not entirely) more the result of _my_ limitations rather than Electron's.

Truly native apps are always going to work and perform at least a little bit better (in the general case) but IMO Electron (when done correctly) is at least on par with any other cross-platform framework you can point to.

It's a compromise, but it doesn't _have_ to be a major one.

[Semaphor]

As I said, VS Code shows, that it certainly is possible to build performant electron apps. But I’m also saying, that electron is not fully innocent when almost every app built with it sucks.

And assuming you are talking about FATpick, it’s certainly a lot faster than Postman, at least the logged out part I looked at ;)