[throwaway49496]

You prioritized app size, and that's great.

People prefer Electron because it gives them a consistent environment across operating systems, OS versions/update patch numbers, browser versions etc.

If you write your app to work in all possible combinations of the above - like you'd write a web page - you can use OS web view.

But not everybody wants to do that because it's not as straight forward as just writing your app and being able to fully rely on your environment. Perhaps you actually need features that aren't universally available in the OS web view yet, and performance degradation because of polyfills is not acceptable.

Also, OS web view is usually locked down more than Electron. It's basically a browser without the UI around it. Then you need to hack your own native bridge instead of just using whatever Electron made. I guarantee your version is going to be worse, you simply don't have the combined resources of the Electron open source project.

[scarface74]

> People prefer Electron because it gives them a consistent environment across operating systems

People don’t prefer an application that takes up more memory, drains battery life and that’s not consistent with their other apps. Developers may prefer it.

How many users are switching back and forth between Windows and Macs?

The same applies in the other direction. When I was a Windows user, I hated the iTunes interface because it felt like a bad Mac port. I was a former Mac (and current) Mac user so I could tell.

Even before that, the Windows QuickTime Player felt like a bad port.

[throwaway49496]

If the users don't want an Electron app, they won't use it and the developers will feel the need to change their ways.

Software development is not just about the users. Many Electron apps are single dev ventures. It's not easy to maintain multiple different platform specific apps even for a large enterprise. The larger the app the more difficult it becomes.

[palata]

> they won't use it

Except for all those popular Electron apps with lock-in effects, like Discord and Slack.

[throwaway49496]

Seems like the users think it's better to accept the performance degradation than to switch apps.

[palata]

Does it? My feeling is that users use whatever you give them. And then they buy a new device because theirs is "becoming slow". They don't say "wait, Slack is just a glorified IRC, it should work on my iPhone from 2008, I will just refuse to use it" because they need it.

There are no alternatives to the Slack ElectronJS Desktop app. That's the whole point: they don't want to maintain native apps. And they don't open their API to let others do it, I guess because that may hurt their lock-in benefits.

[scarface74]

> Software development is not just about the users

And this says a lot about why people prefer commercial alternatives.