With GTK, QT, Tk, etc we used to have a fairly good near-native cross platform story before mobile happened. Apple's reluctance to accept non-native code, Google's pick of Java for Android and early smartphone resource limits made native code a necessity. Meanwhile the web developed into a universally supported application platform which made it inevitable that JavaScript made its way to mobile as processing power increased.
The desktop became just another platform to target. Few cross platform apps can afford to not target the web with all of its benefits like instant, no install required delivery. A whole generation of developers is growing up on Webpack, Babel and React.
Who can fault Electron for existing?
As a user I mourn the cost at which this new wave of desktop apps come. If it were only memory I could buy more – up to a limit – but many of these apps put us back a good 10 years in responsiveness and even screen real estate. My workstation feels like a two year old phone. Who thought unchecking “Show window contents while dragging” would ever make sense again?
Luckily, to get to the original question, we are getting new options. I'm quite excited about Xamarin, which lets us provide a good experience on mobile, against the native toolkit if we like, but also a fast, familiar desktop app.
This isn't worth anything as long as we can't target the web and this is where I hope WebAssembly will bring us.
I remain hopeful. We must be able to do better than ship web browsers to our desktop users, but maybe we're not quite there yet.