Idle wondering: are there any venture-backed companies founded in the last ten years shipping a substantial native, AppKit-based macOS app?
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The future is web-SaaSy it seems. Perhaps due to reach? A website can be accessed anywhere, a platform specific app requires choosing a platform. Phones seem to change this equation because probably it's hard for developers to do some things via websites (like clubhouse)
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I think platform heterogeneity is the driving factor here, rather than SaaS-ification. A lot of SaaS is almost exclusively used from desktop clients (e.g. Slack), but those clients are still non-native because it's too expensive to support all the relevant platforms.
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Why are people solving the platform problem at runtime (via electron with all it's bloat) rather than at compile time?
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Two reasons seem to dominate:
1. Many of these companies want to ship a web client too.
2. For those who don't, React is in most ways a much more pleasant and hirable development paradigm than e.g. Qt or other compiled cross-platform solutions. Maybe Flutter will change that.
Or maybe it is just because most developers only know web technologies. So it seems obvious to go with something that they can do instead of doing what should be done. All you know is all there is
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Why do we think that someone took the time to measure if it is actually better? All the companies I’ve been have less app developers compared to web developers and far more bugs on web
It’s the same reason why we use English. It’s not a superior language. It’s just the easiest among the most known languages for historical reasons