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Comment by bsg75 | Hacker News Reader

Or perhaps by the chasing the universal / web view on the desktop unicorn. Native apps still best HTML frames on the desktop in terms of functionality, and no amount of cost savings for the vendor will convince users otherwise.

Multiple code bases may be a pain, but they still produce better UIs when you support more than one OS.

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> Multiple code bases may be a pain, but they still produce better UIs when you support more than one OS.

I don't know if that's universally true.

Slack uses Electron for its desktop apps, yet has received a lot of acclaim for its UI and seems to be trouncing alternatives with truly native offerings (IRC, HipChat).

I have always been surprised they get so much UI praise. To me, it feels like the HTML frame that it is, and often confounds my expectations of how a native app works. It is definitely better than its competitors, but that doesn't mean it's all that great. Having said that, it seems like they've wielded the web view approach to achieve a great flexibility and development speed advantage, so it's definitely a valid way of doing things. But I keep waiting for them to switch to full-native now that they're well established and can afford way more developers.

I'd hardly call slack the epitome of usability. It guzzles memory, is laggy on my workstation (Xeon cpu lots of ram and a high end gaming gpu), their search functionality is abysmal too. I quite like slack, but I really wish they would consider a native app, or even just address the performance problems of their chat client.

I do not really understand how Hipchat can be so bad though. The client is ghastly on all platforms and not being able to handle shaky internet connections these days is a joke.

Slack has 2.8 billion reasons why you're absolutely, painfully wrong about this.

Apples and oranges.

Slack's story is more about their service and 3rd party integrations, less so their client apps. A messaging client needs far fewer client features than a service like Evernote, and can get away with a simpler development environment. A web frame in a box works for Slack, but not for Evernote.

Evernote's client from a feature and polish perspective is as important as their service. The service need to store and sync (where they also have problems), but the client has to cover a multitude of other features. Cutting corners on the client layer to ease development has had an obvious impact on the UX.

I believe they made about 30M in 2015. At an evaluation almost 100 times revenue, I think this story isn't done playing out yet.

I don't understand what you're even trying to say.. aren't companies expected to ramp up their revenue over time?

Sure, but a 100x revenue evaluation is incredibly exuberant. For reference, I think Facebook hovers around 15x revenue to market cap.

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