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Comment by gochi | Hacker News Reader

They already have MAUI. I don't have direct professional experience with it, but the message I'm getting from those who have used it, is that it's cumbersome. With people instead just sticking with XF/Uno/Avalonia (Avalonia being closer to Flutter in how it doesn't actually tap into the platform's native frameworks).

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Even if its cumbersome, it's still a win-win for them to use it.

The outlook app will be native desktop and mobile (except linux for now).

Plus it will give the maui project more credibility, help grow its userbase. Make the framework better by providing a real world project for the maui team to benchmark, highlighting pain point, provide in-house feedback, feature request.

I would be interested to know from anyone at the Office/Outlook team why they went with what they did, and if they had any awareness of MAUI happening at all. Fully agree with the noted benefits, so any non-MAUI team insight would be really interesting

Has the Office team ever paid that much attention to what Windows was actually recommending?

All the releases that I can think of shunned the standard UI toolkits for their own homegrown UI. Presumably to show the Windows folks that the Office team is it's own little empire.

Excel even had its own custom C compiler.

My guess would be that they're looking for parity with web apps. I have teams installed on my corporate desktop but I just use the web application any other time and it's... identical.

If you want an identical experience with identical code across the Web, iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux then there is only one solution.

Biggest issue with MAUI imo is the lack of a Linux desktop option, wether a wrapper over GTK, QT or whatever. There's been some effort, but MS is pretty much willfully ignoring it. Not that Linux desktop is huge, but it's approaching half of where OSX is and given the early adopter focus is for Developer, it's IMO a massive miss.

Cross-platform desktop apps, should at least cover Windows, OSX and Linux (appImage/Flatpak) as a baseline. Avalonia works well enough, but MAUI just muddied the waters. With the massive efforts towards web-ui in general, it's really not surprising that many devs/shops are just shrinkwrapping with Electron. Even if there are far lighter options for embedded browser usage of the system's browser engine. In the end, the state of desktop apps sucks all around.

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