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windows2020

In the case of Teams, I think they regret choosing Electron.

A Xamarin app doesn't need to use XML or Xamarin Forms which provides UI components. A totally custom interface/game can be developed with Xamarin + SkiaSharp which provides drawing primitives.

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As a user with a finite amount of memory on my computer, I also regret them choosing Electron.

They should hire better engineers, perhaps those with more experience than just leet code. The apps i built using electron for some clients have none of the issues teams has. I mean come on, teams is a basic chat app, how difficult is it to optimise it?

Yes, it's a "basic" chat app. Like google is a "basic" search engine, how hard can it be to make something like that? Just make it go search?

Comparing teams to google is a bit meh. There’s nothing special about that app other than how crap it is. A poorly written tool made by inexperienced devs.

Teams is also very bloated (or "full featured" depending on how you want to spin it) compared to other chat apps, which does make it special by comparison.

Teams is trying very hard to make itself a platform, and it supports telephony in a way that other chat apps don't. I can be reached on my work Teams account via a dedicated phone number, and the account includes a bunch of Viva applications and pretty deep integrations with Office, SharePoint, and Power Platform.

First indicator that teams is ill designed is feature creep. But i suppose people find some utility in it. Telephony is likely handled by a server and teams is acting as a video / voice client just like any other modern chat app. I dont know about its integration with office and other microsoft bloatware but i do imagine those integrations are poorly designed as well. Microsoft products are well known for taking up memory for no good reason so i dont see why this would be an exception. Blaming issues on electron is just lazy on their part.

I’m not sure I’ve heard the Teams folks explicitly blaming Electron. I run other, more complex MSFT programs (eg Office) on the same computer, and they use a fraction of the memory and CPU that Teams does.

(bit of self-promotion)

They do have a React version on WebView2 that is (supposedly) much better, but it's only for personal accounts right now, though that could change [1].

Thankfully their internal API is fairly self-documenting, so I've been looking into creating my own Teams client if you're interested [2]. We'll see if it'll have been an effort in vain depending on how well Microsoft Teams 2.0 goes.

[1] https://www.techradar.com/news/a-new-generation-of-microsoft...

[2] https://blog.opercom.co.uk/posts/news-13-08-22/

“so I've been looking into creating my own Teams client if you're interested”

thanks for the link, looks good. styling and eye candy can be added later. first i think it just needs to be optimised for low memory and speed - not using react is a good step in this direction.

I agree that the client's performance is important. I'm hoping to avoid frameworks so that any issues will be as clear as possible, but maintenance will tell if that's a good decision.

Maintenance may be pita but the issue with using web specific ui frameworks for a desktop electron app is that web frameworks arent meant to be run for a long time. They take a lot of memory. One has to find the right balance between what to do in the renderer process (ideally nothing more but really basic css and js, maybe a web worker or two), and everything else in the main process.

I threat the main process as a backend api and use ipc as a broker between that and the ui. The renderer process does nothing but show text and icons. From that point on one can have fun with threads and all :-)

Teams is integrated with lots of other products such as AD, O365... It's far from a "basic chat app". I am sure the app you wrote does not have millions of users daily, either.

"I am sure the app you wrote does not have millions of users daily, either"

This argument is weak. Its not like millions of people are crammed within the app all at the same time, while integrated with AD, or other microsoft bloatware. It may impress inexperienced devs, but it's really not much of an architectural challenge. MS could have done a better job.

But to satisfy your curiosity, my background is in developing some rather large systems, used by hundreds of millions. Not these apps specifically (although they do handle large amounts of data, a lot more than teams), and it's a good indicator that I know what I am talking about and without bragging I can smell poor design and a lazy job.

AD is bloatware? O365 is?

I think the only inflated thing here is your ego.

I dont think you should be taking this personal. But yes, both are bloatware.

I don't think you should be talking about things you don't know or understand.

These products have an audience because microsoft speaks management. My advice for them is to git gud and move on.

I know Teams gets a lot of hate on here. Perhaps I am a special exception, but I just don’t see it. Of course I don’t expect much from it, but it’s definitely not the worst chat client I have used. Granted I am using it on MacOS, iOS, and iPadOS, so maybe the hate is not on those platforms.

They could also just use flutter which is skia under the hood - I think would be substantially faster than dealing with Xamarin.

Doing stuff with Skia on MAUI at least is tricky because there is no concept of a mouse, so good luck creating a hover effect on your button.

https://github.com/dotnet/maui/issues/3739

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