Ask HN: Would you rather have an Electron app or macOS Only Native? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would you rather have an Electron app or macOS Only Native?

4 pointsskwee35712 comments

Hey HN!

I'm working on a personal finance desktop only application[1]. I'm a solo developer, doing it in my free time, with the intention to release a great product (and make money from it).

I personally dislike Electron Apps and try to avoid them if possible. However I understand the appeal behind them for developers.

With my current time, skills and funding - I'm either able to release an Electron application with decent support for all 3 major OSes with all the drawbacks of Electron (big binary, maybe-slow [my core logic is done in Rust, and JS is used primarily for the UI], alien-looking); or a native for 1 platform, MacOS in my case.

I believe in having clean UI and smooth experience, hence the choice of Electron bothers me a lot. On the other side, most of the drawbacks of Electron are expressed by (mainly) tech-savvy people.

So, dear HN - what would you pick: Electron or MacOS Only native?

[1] https://moneypin.app/

since you are at the execution phase, i would do the electron app first to get things going. then consider a macOS native.

i may be overestimating everything involved in releasing software for macOS. but i have played with swift and made a few local apps and found it difficult to put desktop apps together. you will find plenty of iOS resources though. they were still porting some of the SDKs to swift from objective-c when i was playing with it.

people who know objective-c and the macOS SDKs beforehand would have better luck.

with electron, i suspect the open-source community would have solutions for most issues. or tell you the limitations. you will know then what you are gaining with a macOS native app.

that's what i would do...

Thanks! That's what I was thinking about as well.

If you do not intend to charge for the App, ( You could still charge for the online services if there are any ), Electron.

If you intend to make some money from the App, a polished macOS app tends to have higher chance of user paying you.

I don't use my Mac anymore, so having a cross-platform Electron app would probably be your best bet. If you don't mind cutting out 80% of the desktop market share though, I can't stop you from going Mac-only.

> cutting out 80% of the desktop market share

From my experience paying for desktop software is more common in the Mac world than on Windows, so if you're making a paid app you can actually end up better off going Mac-only despite technically cutting out 80% of potential customers.

If you make a cross-platform app, you get the same benefits with Windows users included.

Can you offer a web app? I will absolutely not install an Electron app (and run a separate browser runtime eating 1GB of RAM) but am happy to open an extra tab in my existing browser.

I understand you. I'm not able to offer a web app, as the concept of my application is purely a desktop application.

Is there a reason you don't want to do a web app and insists it must be a desktop app?

Separately, from a business perspective, a one-time fee might make this difficult to sustain unless you plan to charge for future updates (it's not clear from the current landing page).

Can you clarify your thoughts here?

Hey!

First of all, the niche of personal finance if overfilled with web apps, and based on my research, people do want to have Desktop Application with offline first support.

Second of all, I don't understand the concept of "everything is a web app". I truly believe that desktop application are here to stays for long years (take a look at professional software such as DAWs, Video Editing, CAD and etc - none of them were ported to the web and I doubt they will be soon).

Having said that, I realize that the world is connected and I do plan to offer a synchronization service that will be able to sync your data across devices.

As for pricing. I know that one time fee is not sustainable, however I'm also very very sad (as a consumer) that the world moved to subscription model. I believe in ownership of the software rather than renting. I have not yet finalized the details for the payment, but I am leaning towards 2 options payment model (where the user will be able to choose one of the two options): (1) Monthly subscription (you rent the software, pay less upfront and enjoy all the updates) OR (2) One time purchase with a charge for updates (you OWN the software and don't have to upgrade, but you are locked to a specific version which will (most likely) have bug fixes and for any future features, a one time yearly fee will be applied).

Strictly from a business perspective ("make money from it"), going with Electron seems like the logical path to reaching the largest market of users.

MacOS-only native.

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