Ask HN: What would you use to make cross-platform desktop application?

You have two options: either make the app work natively with your platforms, sharing all the code that does not directly work with platform only features, or use something that can run things on multiple platforms.

I would personally lean towards doing the last, with the target being the JVM -- that doesn't have to mean use Java, as there are many much better languages that target the JVM.

I tried switching to Atom a few times, but I couldn't handle the slowness. It's just too laggy. On the other hand, I recently switched to VS Code, and I couldn't be happier. The startup is still a little slower than Sublime, but the editor is blazing fast. I really think this is just a problem with the architecture of Atom.

Spotify is also a bit slow and clunky, but it's not too bad. There's no reason why they couldn't aggressively pre-fetch a lot of pages to make the UI feel snappy. E.g. "Browse", "Radio", and all the tabs under "Your Music". And if you're playing a track, just pre-fetch the artist and album pages. If I can click something in the UI, it should already be loaded.

But even when stuff is already cached, the UI takes about 500ms to render the new page. Sometimes it's only a few hundred ms, but there's a nasty black flash before it renders. the new page. There's really no reason for that either. There are so many ways you could speed that up to make it instant. For example, just render everything above the fold, then add the rest of the content later.

Spotify's internet connection detection drives me crazy sometimes. Sometimes it takes 20-30 seconds to get back online, but I don't think that's related to JS. Their polling interval is just too long. There's no reason why they couldn't poll once per second and come back online immediately.

Is OSX support ready?

Every Electron app I tried halved my battery life. Sure, regular people won't complain about your electron "desktop" app, they'll just complain about crappy batteries of their laptop, or about "my computer getting slow".

In fact, every time you hear a non-programmer complain about their computer it's usually not a hardware, but a software like electron that's ruining their experience.

OSes have started to add application profiling recently, so once every mainstream OS starts loudly pointing a finger at offensive applications (like "uninstall Spotify/Slack and you'll get 4 more hours of battery life"), you'll start hearing complaints from non-programmers.

Let's confront "worse is better" directly: more-popular software is not the same as better software.

The Web is a race to the bottom in the quest for eyeballs. If eyeballs aren't what you desire, you can give the set of users you do have a much better experience: smoother interactions, better adaptation to system preferences, automated security and functionality updates to components via the OS distribution, better accessibility, etc.