if they dont fix it on MacOS and Linux they’ll keep getting bad feedback. The whole point of using web tech is being cross platform, looks like they don’t get it
> The whole point of using web tech is being cross platform, looks like they don’t get it
They never got it, the current Teams app was never actually cross-platform. It has wildly different features depending on platform (browser, "native", OS). Funnily if you switch your user agent you get all features even on Linux (clearly the afterthought) though.
I'm wondering if part of the push to those electron apps is because more young developers know how to use HTML/CSS and JavaScript than there are people who know how to use GDI+, Qt, and so on. Maybe cross-platform support is actually an afterthought.
A lot of decisions in the modern IT industry seem to be based on so-called "developer experience". It doesn't matter that your binary is hundreds of megabytes, it doesn't matter that an IM client takes up a gigabyte of RAM and 10% of CPU just running in the background — what matters is that developers have a "nice" experience. All these problems stem from that.
Software developers who actually know what they're doing and ignore fashion aren't as exciting to hire, I guess.
They’re obviously more expensive to hire rather than less exciting. Native cross-platform development for a medium-to-large app is a hell of an investment. On going maintenance and dealing with platform upgrades is costly. Probably super impractical more often than not. I don’t see it boiling down simply to “developer experience”, but I don’t completely disagree on that point.
Instead, you leverage what you already have - any modern product is already going to have a web interface. The idea of packaging that interface into a self-contained desktop application with little to no additional effort is just too appealing. Sure, everybody else screws it up when attempting this route, and performance becomes a huge problem, but surely your team will do it right. And besides, webdevs are a dime a dozen compared to C++ guys (and fluent on two or three platforms? Good luck. You’ll pay through the nose the get them and more to keep them.)
It is, that and if you want to get something out of the door quickly then electron is a good way to do it. Part of that is web tech is higher level than writing qt/gtk apps, and part of that is the additional developers that you mentioned.
Developers that know how to make native desktop apps well are a dying breed
They never got it, the current Teams app was never actually cross-platform. It has wildly different features depending on platform (browser, "native", OS). Funnily if you switch your user agent you get all features even on Linux (clearly the afterthought) though.