In some ways I can I understand it, because if you want to deploy a GUI application which mostly consists of text and pictures across multiple platforms, this is probably most viable option in a lot of cases, but the fact that this is the case is a failure of the market and the industry
Yep. Native software development houses never invested enough in making a cross platform app toolkit as good as the web. There’s no technical reason why we don’t have something like electron, but lightweight and without javascript. But native-feeling cross platform UI is really hard (like $100M+ hard) and no individual company cares enough to make it happen. I’m sure it would be a great investment for the industry as a whole, but every actor with the resources is incentivised to solve their problems using different approaches. It’s pretty disappointing.
I don't think it's at all possible to make cross-platform GUIs that feel native. It's of course fine to share the core of your application across platforms, but you have to make the UI part separately for each platform for a truly nice result. There's no escaping that. And it's not like companies like Slack and Discord lack the resources to do so — they absolutely deliberately continue stubbornly ignoring the fact that, setting aside excessive resource usage, no one likes UIs that look and feel out of place in their OS. They totally have the resources necessary to rewrite their apps to use native UI toolkits on all supported systems.
I don't know engineers from in there but I am willing to bet $100 that part of them really want to make native OS UIs. It's just that business will never green-light that as a priority.
Although I'm not a huge fan of it, you could argue that Flutter is trying to solve this problem in some ways and has the right backing to be able to pull it off. It unfortunately doesn't feel native though (apart from on Android).
Qt still feels not quite right on macOS — because it draws the controls itself instead of using the native ones. wxWidgets is the best of the bunch, because it apparently does wrap AppKit into itself, but then again, the layouts apps use give away that it's a cross-platform thing.
