Writing Slack as a native app would be a massive pain. Especially due to all the web-like features it has, the fact that it's one codebase (mainly) for desktop and web.
They also have to support Windows, Linux, Mac and mobile. Not an easy task
Slack APIs aren't perfect, but they're good enough to allow 3rd party clients for terminals, Emacs[0], and the like. I've never dug into it because I avoid Slack in general, but I think the biggest hurdle right now is just user authentication.
That's a pain, and does limit your audience, but maybe you'd still find some buyers on HN.
Games feel like a separate edge case. One of the most common complaints about cross-platform apps is they don't "feel native" or adhere to platform UX expectations. With games, there's an expectation they'll provide their own wholly own UI that doesn't match an existing commercial OS.
Also, video games aren't generally expected to be accessible to blind people via screen readers. If you develop a cross-platform app with a custom UI, it's going to have zero accessibility unless you implement each platform's accessibility API.
Yes, game devs already put in the effort of providing their own UI stack, and port that to every OS.
If most Electron apps were built as "games", i.e. providing their own UI via DirectX/OpenGL/Metal etc., I wonder if they might still be more efficient and less bloated than Electron apps are now.
LibreOffice has native versions for all major desktop platforms, does many more things than Slack, and is maintained by open source volunteers and the Document Foundation staff of six.
You're probably right about cant, but why would they want to? A native version of their app would either embed a web browser or end up half-implementing one poorly. Why not just start with one?
Yeah, the latter feels more put together, you don't have the awkwardness of communication between C++ and JS, and your web browser app will work in a web browser.
The Mac cocoa version of Telegram achieves most of the same features as slack without resorting to webviews and shares 99% of its code with the iOS app (meaning the Mac build adds practically no overhead).
Windows and Linux are another beast, and Telegram’s solution is to use Qt for those platforms. Again, slack like capabilities with no webviews.
The difficulty of native dev is not as high as it’s often represented.
I have little experience with native iOS development, so you might well be right. That said, Telegram strikes me as quite a bit simpler than Slack. Not just in number of features, but also considering how many of the features are 'strange' UI.
As an aside, apparently the next version of Telegram will be a complete rewrite done in Swift, and snappier as a result.
Slacks annual revenue was 200 million in 2017, when they were a 5 billion dollar valued company. 200 mil is just 1000 Bay Area salaries, and they do have other budget items.
Its entirely possible that they cannot fund 5 native development teams, while building their core features to justify their valuation, and paying their sales and marketting team to actually generate revenue.
5 Devs on each team, which should be more than enough if they're getting 200k a year would cost a total of 5 mil. A tiny amount for such a huge improvement for users.
It does sound like a joke. It also ignores that fact that other, proper, multiplatform technologies exist that still produce a far superior end result for the user even if not 100% platform guidelines/conventions compliant.
What do you mean? Slack is valued at ~5 billion dollars, that has very little to do with their actual cash on hand. In 2016, they were bringing less than 65 million in revenue, for example.
When you're working on your own project, some time sink that you didn't anticipate may be frustrating, but other than that, I definitely prefer it to coding something I already know how to do well.
