[wccrawford]

I haven't done desktop UIs in a while, but my experience is that html and css work really well for UI, and there are a ton of competing desktop UIs that all have their own issues. Last time I tried making a desktop UI, I definitely preferred html over it.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot more web devs than native devs, too.

And finally, if you have something you want centralized, it's generally a lot easier to just have a web server than setting up some kind of system to sync the data between different computers. For finances, I could see wanting to use it on both mobile and desktop on a daily basis. That makes web a lot more desirable.

[eeghyrdcg]

Indeed. I can’t imagine doing native desktop development unless it was absolutely required for my project, and then I’d ask myself if maybe I shouldn’t just work on something else. All that work and it runs on one OS.

[octobus2021]

HTML and CSS are most definitely NOT better for the UI comparing to the native desktop apps. HTML was designed for cross-reference documents and people spent decades enriching it with CSS/JS/whatever to get some resemblance of acceptable UI. Not even mentioning all the resources required to run all the frameworks that the modern Web UI is running on.

If you want to be able to check your finances on the phone you have to put it on a 3rd party server along with your data. Might as well go with SaaS like Mint. I don't.

You do lose some cross-platform capabilities when you do desktop apps, that is true, but there are some toolsets available (eg Qt).

So I guess it comes down to what people are used to work with, which is Web-first.

[ebiester]

The developer experience for Electron is much better than PySide + QT free, and nobody is spending 5,000 a year to write their own apps.

[stnmtn]

I think the original point is that if you're goal is to build cross-platform quickly, nothing right now beats html+css in electron.