[foepys]

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.

[grishka]

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.

[agarren]

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.)

[shaunsingh0207]

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