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by josephg 801 days ago
The big problem is that nobody wants yet another platform-specific UI framework. Even Microsoft is using electron (or something like it) to build Microsoft Teams.

If you build a cross-platform UI framework, it'll probably end up looking a bit ugly and custom on every platform (eg Java Swing). Making a cross-platform UI toolkit that looks native everywhere is an insane amount of work, because different platforms have very different UI toolkits, with different built-in components and different platform conventions. This problem becomes 10x harder if you want to make it work on mobile as well.

Some people try anyway - and bless their cotton socks. But electron (and arguably Qt) are the closest we've got. And even then, most electron apps seem to be full of custom components.

2 comments

Thanks, that makes sense. Where can I find a Windows specific (or Linux specific)? I actually don't care about cross-platform. Desktop is dominated by Windows anyway.

QT is not bad and I used it for a small project. But it follows native so I'm not sure how to go back to native Win2000 style.

That's not really the cause. As you say, Electron apps don't look native either. The issues are elsewhere.