1) Why use several host platforms if the platform makes no difference to you?
2) If you know a platform then you should have no problems knowing how to use it.
It would be ridiculous to have an app from Windows behave exactly the same in Mac OS just because you don't want to remember the difference. You don't want minimize and maximize buttons put on the opposite side of all other mac apps because that is how it is on windows. You don't want copy paste in Slack to use Ctrl rather than command key because that is what you do on Windows.
3) Whatever time you save from doing everything the same across platforms would be wasted, for anybody not working cross platform who suddenly have to deal with an app with completely non-standard alien behavior. I want my standard mac hot keys to work in a mac app. I want preferences to be in the standard location. I want my color and font selectors to work the way they work all other places. I want drag and drop to work like in all other Mac apps.
We Mac users have seen this again and again. When companies don't give a shit about our platform, it is usually just a question of time before a competitor arrives which does, and knocks the other guy out. You don't survive that long ignoring the platform unless you got some lock-in advantage.
Why else do you think people make a big point of an app being native Cocoa? It is because they know it sells better, because they know customers want the native well integrated experience.
> 1) Why use several host platforms if the platform makes no difference to you?
I don't, I use The Web for 90% of all things I use on a computer. A Chromebook is one of the computers I use the most when not working for precisely this reason.
> Why else do you think people make a big point of an app being native Cocoa? It is because they know it sells better, because they know customers want the native well integrated experience.
I think you're mistaken, the fact that so many company are switching to Electron is evidence that it doesn't sell better.
I think you're mistaken, the fact that so many company are switching to Electron is evidence that it doesn't sell better.
Hold on a bit with that assertion.
First: which apps built on Electron are being sold, period? All the ones I'm aware of are open source, like Atom, or front ends to services, like Slack.
Second: which companies are switching to Electron for development? Again, all the Electron apps I'm familiar with are ones that started out that way. While I'm sure there's probably an app or two out there that began as a native client and then went to "let's just be a web wrapper," I don't know of any big ones offhand. (I've come across companies that have shifted their strategy to using true native applications, however. Facebook famously shifted their mobile strategy from HTML5/JS to native apps some years back, and I know of several iOS apps that were using "write everything in JS, it'll be great!" toolkits that switched to actual native AppKit.)
Third, and admittedly anecdotally, in both my experience and what I've consistently heard and read from people who've had the opportunity to study the UX of both native and "wrapped web" apps, just because users don't use the language of developers doesn't mean they don't notice when apps are slow, resource-hoggy, and behave kinda weirdly compared to other apps. I run a Slack for a writing group that's mostly populated by non-technical people and it is not uncommon for users to complain about Slack "slowing down their machine." Just because people don't know the term "native app" doesn't mean they aren't going to be able to tell "this app over here is nicer to use than that app over there," and that might be because "that app over there" doesn't minimize properly, or has weird menus that put common things in uncommon places, or doesn't do what they expect when they right-click on selected objects.
2) If you know a platform then you should have no problems knowing how to use it.
It would be ridiculous to have an app from Windows behave exactly the same in Mac OS just because you don't want to remember the difference. You don't want minimize and maximize buttons put on the opposite side of all other mac apps because that is how it is on windows. You don't want copy paste in Slack to use Ctrl rather than command key because that is what you do on Windows.
3) Whatever time you save from doing everything the same across platforms would be wasted, for anybody not working cross platform who suddenly have to deal with an app with completely non-standard alien behavior. I want my standard mac hot keys to work in a mac app. I want preferences to be in the standard location. I want my color and font selectors to work the way they work all other places. I want drag and drop to work like in all other Mac apps.
We Mac users have seen this again and again. When companies don't give a shit about our platform, it is usually just a question of time before a competitor arrives which does, and knocks the other guy out. You don't survive that long ignoring the platform unless you got some lock-in advantage.
Why else do you think people make a big point of an app being native Cocoa? It is because they know it sells better, because they know customers want the native well integrated experience.