Juicy intro from Nikita Prokopov:
In “Why is Claude an Electron App?” Drew Breunig wonders:
Claude spent $20k on an agent swarm implementing (kinda) a C-compiler in Rust, but desktop Claude is an Electron app.
If code is free, why aren’t all apps native?
And then argues that the answer is that LLMs are not good enough yet. They can do 90% of the work, so there’s still a substantial amount of manual polish, and thus, increased costs.
But I think that’s not the real reason. The real reason is: native has nothing to offer.
Thoughts?
Email me or comment below.
Also CodePen PRO is quite a deal. 🙏
I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on this, as a web developer with limited native development exp. but interest in the space. I can’t imagine it truly has nothing to offer, right? Better battery usage, no Chromium bundle wasting space, and a UI layer more closely related to the system its being developed for.
I’m with you on this one. As someone who uses many native applications on my GNU/Linux machine, it is a world apart in terms of system integration and resource usage vs. my Windows work laptop. For example, KDE’s Kate, a fully featured text editor with plugins, a built-in terminal, git integration, text-completion, and more, uses less RAM on startup than Microsoft’s Notepad. Also, apps look and feel like part of my system, open nigh-instantly, and developers don’t have to either style everything by hand or rely on giant CSS libraries that have to be parsed in real-time. KDE’s Kirigami offers devs low-level performance with an easy to use, declarative, cross-platform, convergent UI framework. KDE’s Okular document viewer won the Blue Angel environmental award for how little power it uses compared to alternatives (the first piece of software to ever win this award). Like wired headphones, native may be unfashionable to big-tech today, but it’s still the clear winner in terms of performance. Native apps respect users’ time, and the environment.