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Comment by denkmoon | Hacker News Reader

People sometimes pay for these things like email and search which they can get for “free” because they want to conduct business with reasonable people who will provide good custodianship of their data and be a reliable partner long term. I don’t want to have to change email provider when my next invoice comes up because they put 6 devs on building an electron app for a year. Hyperbole obviously but their actions are an important indicator of how sane and grounded management is and will continue to be into the future.

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Pretty sure none of us are going to see this reflected on our invoices.

The price isn't the problem, having someone reasonable hosting my email is. IMO electron apps are the biggest waste of time out. Our browsers can do this already. So I don't see the point, or it being reasonable.

So if they released a native desktop app with fewer features, do you think it’d be worth it? Or do you think they shouldn’t write any apps?

Electron is the most cost effective, least wasteful way to produce a desktop app on all 3 OSes. They’re providing a feature to people who wanted it, while wasting less money from ungrateful customers like yourself who don’t care. It’d cost much more to build & maintain a native desktop app when electron works just fine.

The question is why is a desktop app needed in the first place? Is it worth the effort for the number of people who want it, given they can achieve the same thing with zero effort from the developer by pressing a few buttons? What special feature is achieved here? You can use fastmail offline using the browser, you can make sites into "apps" for your taskbar or dock in windows and macos (are we making electron apps for linux hyprland ricers?), and you can set the fastmail website as the default email client. The audience here seems to be "people who want to use the fastmail webmail client but don't want to use it in their regular web browser and don't know how to achieve that with the built in tools"?

Fastmail are an awesome developer, JMAP is great, their mobile apps are great and actually offer some reason to exist, and I like their ethos as far as I can tell. None of this detracts from the fact making an electron app that does nothing other than shell a website, in nearly every case, is a waste of time.

This is just peak HN. The irony is that your argument for valuing “sane, grounded management” rests on a dogmatic personal dislike of Electron. You’re equating “things I wouldn’t do” with “management gone off the rails”. Of all the things an email provider could do to seem unreasonable, building an Electron app isn’t exactly high on the list.

Peak HN is assuming the factor I commented about is the sole factor I'm considering. but yes, "doing things I wouldn't do" is definitely part of my criteria for "are management doing a bad job". This seems quite reasonable.

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