The demise of native coded apps

Posted by Christoph
Dec 6, 2020 at 02:14 PM

Simon - ok I’ll bite.

The problem with OS specific coded apps is that you end up in the walled garden of your Apple word, and you can never leave it because your most important apps only run on MacOs and you are so used to the Mac keyboard. I like when I have the freedom to move away to another OS knowing that I can continue to use my most favorite apps there. Sure, developers could provide their software as native apps for all the major platforms, but the development cost and the cost of the product as well. Also, development pace would come to a crawl, because features need to implemented in all the different apps. That’s why Evernote went that road. The maintenance burden of the different apps on the different platforms was simply too high. The idea to consolidate was not a bad one, it was just badly carried out. And I really don’t think all platform-independent apps are ugly or slow. Yes, many of them are. But there are many very usable, stylish and sufficiently fast platform independent apps, including Electron apps. I’m thinking of Visual Studio Code and Obsidian for example. The user communities of such apps are also much greater and more diverse because they do not only cosist of Mac users. I really hate it when shiny new apps are only available for Mac. Yes, Apple is nice, and there are many great native apps for Mac, but I know that as soon as I buy a Mac, I will be locked into the Apple world, and need to buy expensive hardware from a single company from then on, and can never go back.

Simon wrote:
I’m here to lament the demise of OS specific coded apps. There is an
>increasing trend to use Java, Electron, Catalyst and the like. Why do I
>dislike this? Because the user experience in general is pants. I don’t
>know what Microsoft use, but on my mac I can’t use simple shortcuts such
>as CMD A or E to get to the beginning or end of a line. It irks me. Also
>the UI changes, slower responses and general sluggishness. The
>difference between native macOS apps and these imposter apps is as
>different as night and day.
> >Is this what we have to look forward to? Apps coded once that kinda work
>on all platforms, but are unpleasant in the main and don’t integrate
>with any OS well?