[jkbr]

Yes, an Electron app is worse than a native app. An Electron app is also infinitely better then no app.

It's a trade-off.

Without Electron and the likes, a fraction of the apps that are now almost effortlessly cross-platform would exist for Linux, for example.

[krapp]

It's only a tradeoff because for some reason we decided, collectively, that writing native apps is impossible.

[pmontra]

We did multi platform apps when we still called them programs. We used some cross platform toolkits with either cross platform UIs that felt out of place everywhere or a layer that hooked to a common subset of the native ones, with maybe an option to go really native. We wrote C or C++, mostly.

Then HTML became that common subset of the UI and the browser JS runtime and rendering engine replaced the cross platform toolkit. Bloated, not optimized for space and time as it could be, etc, but very convenient.

[donor20]

Microsoft lost the plot with their app frameworks for local apps so electron not so bad and gets you cross platform