cross-posted from: https://ls.buckodr.ink/post/332420
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Calling Slack a webpage is like calling an office building a room.
Slack is just as much a complex app as anything else even if it's built on web tech and standards.
The point is that Slack does not take advantage of Electron at all. It’s no better than running it in a browser.
For Slack it does. Building an app via Electron means it's cross-platform by default, so Slack doesn't need to invest in separate platform teams to solve the same problem (Windows, macOS, Linux).
Electron also has better support for things like native notifications, video and voice calls, offline capabilities, and to other native APIs etc that are either unsupported or spottily supported via the browser.
Flutter?
What about Flutter?
It's a much more lightweight option for building cross platfrom apps than Electron. Heck, even Tauri is better than Electron even though it also uses web technologies for UI.
Flutter came to market much later. It wasn't even a thing when Slack started building using Electron. I'm sure the same applies to Tauri as well.
Maybe so but it has improved a lot over time. The app devs share some responsibility too so it's not all on Electron.
That's the Dev's design choice, not a limitation of Electron.
I don't disagree but at the end of the day it doesn't matter to enough people for it to become an issue. People are used to Slack and the way it works.
Moreover the cost of building the same app 2x or 3x simply doesn't make business sense.
What do you mean? I can't speak for Slack but I'm sure some degree of business logic / client side logic separation exists.
By the way, what you just described is the essence of cross-platform development, rather than an argument for building apps natively.
But why would you rewrite the "front-end" for each platform if you have one you could just port over? Who is going to pay for those 2x developers and what would be the ROI on this effort?
In Slack's case I'd wager the answer to be a resounding YES. I don't think you fully grasp the full scope Slack's capabilities, and the amount of work involved to build native clients for not just one or two, but three different platforms - it's definitely not just the "UI".
Quite the opposite - frameworks like Electron let's devs with your skillset build with the stack you already know, and abstracts away quite a bit of the cross-platform complexities, which strangely enough is what you are suggesting but also what you are arguing against