Yet another opinion on Electron apps

The other day Daring Fireball reported on the Electron App / Tahoe lag issue, and he took the opportunity to respond to Theo Browne who previously responded to a Daring Fireball comment on Electron apps.

In Theo’s video, he makes some decent points. Of course, Electron attracts a lot of newbies and people who just aren't concerned with doing it right so it will just have a higher percentage of bad apps. His examples of where Electron was faster, I suspect, is because someone was new to SwiftUI (same issue) and judging by the minimal amount of information they didn’t know what they should have been doing. I was there too when I started out with SwiftUI. Maybe I’m still there now at times.

The only good comparison between any two ways of writing an app would be to take the experts in their domain and have them make the app.

Just look at some twitter clients like Tweetbot and Twitterific, or the Reddit apps like Apollo. It’s not difficult to see that one or even a handful of people can make a superior experience to a whole team of well-paid Silicon Valley employees. I imagine that is part of the reason 3rd party clients were effectively shutdown for both of those platforms, or why companies that provide Electron-based apps like Slack) don’t want 3rd party clients. If someone outside the company makes a better experience, it will be harder to control the experience fully. I.E. force a new feature on users that they don’t want, and you’re hoping they’ll adopt out of exhaustion in trying to avoid it. That kind of goes with Theo’s complaint about Mac’s UI not changing much. Sure, because that’s what users prefer. What they don’t prefer is a dozen apps that decide they’re going to invent a new way to do things different to everyone else because their brand and uniqueness matters more than their users.

I do think you can make a decent app with Electron, but it is the Walmart of frameworks. I shop at Walmart too, it’s not bad. But Electron, like Walmart, will never be great. I’m not even sure that Electron wants to be great.

There is no great electron app that is the inspirational design for anyone intending to enter that app’s market. They’re all walled gardens, like Slack, or they’re just fine. I’ll be happy to eat my hat if I’m wrong, but I think that will always be the story for JavaScript.