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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

> What struck me about all this is that Google doesn't actually have the ability to develop real desktop application. That's really weird, why wouldn't they want to have the best performing, most powerful applications possible on the desktops? Because they can't. Google as an organisation doesn't have the mental capacity and patience to do real desktop programs.

Because it's a waste of very expensive time to develop native desktop apps in 3 different platforms?

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> Because it's a waste of very expensive time to develop native desktop apps in 3 different platforms?

Facebook gave up on the one app and does native apps for the major phones for a reason: native is faster, ultimately more powerful and you have more control to fix bugs.

Electron is a nice option these days. Slack and VS Code are first-in-class applications, and while there's a slight performance hit compared to native, it's still a better experience than web (otherwise, people would have stuck with slack.com)

I think Electron is bloated garbage, and it's a massive waste to shove a Chrome install into your chat client to be a chat client...

...But it's still better than Google telling the parent they have to install Chrome to install Google Chat.

Fwiw, I use discord.com, slack.com, and teams.com. So at least some folks prefer chat in browser to Electron. I do this to preserve system resources, but because they somehow seem to work better for whatever reason when run from within the browser.

Counterpoint: Electron is a terrible option these days, and while I'd be okay with a "performance hit", it's actually UI lagginess that I can't deal with (and makes it a horrible frustration to deal with).

Isn't that just your opinion, versus the fact that it's the most popular IDE out there, so the plurality of programmers find that it's good enough?

Isn’t that just their opinion? I know many developers using Emacs because it’s insanely powerful and lightning fast, unlike modern IDEs.

Just like it’s a waste of time to develop 3 different chat platforms?

Is it really that expensive though? Again, take Chat, how many developers would that really require? My guess is three to five for each platform. One skilled Mac developer would be enough to be honest, but let's say five for redundancy and speed. I fairly sure Google have more than 15 developers on the PWA.

Plus given the similarities between APIs/languages, the same team of developers could likely handle iOS, iPadOS, and macOS without significantly more work than just iOS and iPadOS (assuming the developers are comfortable with all three platforms).

The majority of the underlying libraries wouldn't necessarily need to be changed; "only" the UI layer and some of the APIs (which is non-trivial, but doable).

> Because it's a waste of very expensive time to develop native desktop apps in 3 different platforms?

and yet the latest-and-greatest cross platform framework is supposed to be Flutter

It's mobile first, desktop and web versions are in alpha, and it's not supposed to replace generic web apps.

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