> see if you can get this webapp running in electron, and maybe figure out how to do push notifications and save data locally. Two days later the project is done. A week later, the app is ready to install.
So you had an app that was already written, ported it to electron (designed to make the port as painless as possible), and you note that this is easier than writing it from scratch with non-web APIs? This is not exactly suprising, is it?
So true. I don't think it's a surprise for anyone that developers experienced in web technology find it easier to make apps using the thing they're experienced with.
In a parallel universe, a junior dev who only learned Qt would have same amount lot of trouble making websites.
> So you had an app that was already written, ported it to electron
True, and had we tried to port to native, that intern would have given up. Most of the business functionality was in a REST api, so porting to native was something that was doable, but the level of effort would have been extreme. Oh, and had we wanted native on Mac, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS... well... that's 5x jumbo right there.
As a general remark, I get confused and maybe even a little irritated when people conflate Android & iOS with macOS/linux/windows. I mean, a device that you interact with almost entirely via (multitouch) and generally has extremely limited display real-estate is fundamentally a totally different platform than a desktop computer. The interaction model, the display design... you're never going to want the same thing on both (unless what you want to do is extremely constrained).
You can sort of kind of pull this off with a relatively limited web app, where the interactions are limited to tapping (since there's generally touch interaction on the desktop) and the fluid layout possibilities of modern CSS give you some chance of coming up with a general design that can work sort of kind of OK across all browsers on all platforms.
But try this for a more complex app, the sort that has been traditionally desktop only, and I think it's extremely hard to design the GUI in a way that can work on both mobile and desktop platforms, regardless of the actual toolkits /technology you are willing to use.
> As a general remark, I get confused and maybe even a little irritated when people conflate Android & iOS with macOS/linux/windows.
Android and iOS represent the majority of devices your software can be run on. They are ubiquitous, and also very dependent on a native UI frameworks that are a somewhat better developer experience than their desktop counterparts, but only because the years of accumulated cruft are less. Incidentally, Android actually does have a desktop mode for it's GUI. That said, users rarely use the desktop Android GUI.
> You can sort of kind of pull this off with a relatively limited web app
I've had better luck with electron and PWAs on the desktop than non-native mobile tooling. This is largely because non-native mobile frameworks often don't have access to the same libraries - or the abstraction layer loses fidelity in trying to be cross platform. There's really no QT grade multiplatform tooling on mobile. There's some promising starts.
> I think it's extremely hard to design the GUI in a way that can work on both mobile and desktop platforms
It's hard to get a decent GUI on both Android and iOS that doesn't have a lot of rough edges with cross platform frameworks. They are coming along, but it's still just not quite there yet.
So you had an app that was already written, ported it to electron (designed to make the port as painless as possible), and you note that this is easier than writing it from scratch with non-web APIs? This is not exactly suprising, is it?