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Comment by speedgoose | Hacker News Reader

You don't have a lot web apps on mobile because the mobile web browsers provide a worse experience compared to native applications, unlike Electron or Chrome on Desktop that provides a much better experience in general (unless you have a 10 years old hardware with very little ram or are into old school GUI I know).

The companies making web browsers and mobile operating systems are the same companies making native applications stores and requesting 30% of the revenue, so they don't have any good reason to make web applications better. They are not non profit.

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> mobile web browsers provide a worse experience compared to native applications, unlike Electron or Chrome on Desktop that provides a much better experience in general

Electron apps are perhaps faster and cheaper to make than native desktop GUI apps for most organizations because they already have Web developers, but I've never heard anyone claim they're "better" than native, if that's what you're saying. Do you mean they're somehow better for the end user? If so, how?

Better compatibility. I have a machine that still runs Windows 7; and electron apps rarely have issues. Many native apps no longer work on my OS.

Malware's backwards compatible with Windows 7. In fact it gets better and better the more time passes.

Yes I was more thinking about development. Faster and cheaper development is the key. Development teams can focus more on the user experience and the features.

You also get a good application on all platforms, GNU/Linux, Windows, and Mac which is nice and used to not be the case.

Electron’s user experience is atrocious even on recent hardware. It falls right into the uncanny valley of superficially appearing native and while not behaving natively.

VS Code is my fav piece of software of all time, it's an Electron app

Agreed it’s an excellent editor however it has a lot of engineering resources behind it and still suffers from sluggish performance, especially on startup.

It starts quickly on my laptops. What kind of hardware do you use ?

Both an Intel and an M1 mac, it's especially noticeable on the newer machine as native apps open instantly, even Xcode, which is a pig seems to open quicker. Like I said it's a great editor and I use it when I need to do some Python or JS work (remote/ssh development functionality is especially nice) but I don't think it's immune from the resource argument against electron.

VS Code is the most frustrating piece of software I use, because it is very good, but it's UX is terrible because they refuse to make any allowances for native platform standards.

I don't use it enough to have any of the hotkeys that aren't bog-standard memorized, and the refusal to add menu options or toolbar buttons makes discoverability really bad.

VS Code is so sluggish that I’ve found myself spending more and more time in vim when Sublime Text isn’t an option.

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