> just brushing off anything made with web technologies because “it wasn’t designed for this” feels very shortsighted in my opinion
That's more of an ideological reason for me. But even setting that aside, you can't ignore the practical downsides I listed
> The fact of the matter is that web technologies are the best tool for the job
As a former app developer, I can assure you that creating truly native apps with the OS's toolkit has been way easier than any web application framework I have ever used, ever.
For example, here are some side projects I built for Windows:
- a web browser, but kind of forgot about it
- a web page editor with live HTML preview, finished but never really released it
On the other hand, it took me hours to get started making a simple react project (setting up the project, styling it, making the basic navigation components), and never finished it.
Sure, my experience is no empirical evidence of anything. But it seems to be a common misconception that building with web technologies is easier than native toolkits.
I understand that the main problem is having to write everything from scratch for every platform, assuming you're not targeting a specific one (then you should definitely go native).
But trust me, outside the Windows world the app dev's life is a lot easier (see GTK, Qt, etc. that work on any OS as long as the DE implements it)
For more complex projects porting is often an option, and for those cases I still think cross platform TKs are much better than web apps. And you usually don't need a web version if the software works natively everywhere possible.
That's more of an ideological reason for me. But even setting that aside, you can't ignore the practical downsides I listed
> The fact of the matter is that web technologies are the best tool for the job
As a former app developer, I can assure you that creating truly native apps with the OS's toolkit has been way easier than any web application framework I have ever used, ever.
For example, here are some side projects I built for Windows:
- a web browser, but kind of forgot about it - a web page editor with live HTML preview, finished but never really released it
On the other hand, it took me hours to get started making a simple react project (setting up the project, styling it, making the basic navigation components), and never finished it.
Sure, my experience is no empirical evidence of anything. But it seems to be a common misconception that building with web technologies is easier than native toolkits.
I understand that the main problem is having to write everything from scratch for every platform, assuming you're not targeting a specific one (then you should definitely go native).
But trust me, outside the Windows world the app dev's life is a lot easier (see GTK, Qt, etc. that work on any OS as long as the DE implements it)
For more complex projects porting is often an option, and for those cases I still think cross platform TKs are much better than web apps. And you usually don't need a web version if the software works natively everywhere possible.