Web still has by far the best developer experience + cross platform stability, not to mention the lowest barrier to entry. I would be really interested to see what happens with Tauri[1] as that looks like a more promising alternative to Electron. I do want to see a return to native apps but there are no worthwhile incentives to do so outside of "our customers demanded a native app." [1] https://tauri.studio/en/
I work in the public sector of Denmark, which has always had native Windows apps for most of our systems. The past few years of suppliers moving to web based solutions have been such a blessing.
Out of the around 300 it-systems we operate, the ones running in a browser are build on a web-front of some sort, electron, included are by far the favoured experience among our 10.000 users. We’ve run a benchmark on our major systems for the past decade, and the only ones to break a 8/10 rating among 500+ users are based on angular, react, electron or vue.
One of our old documenting systems has a Windows application and is also moving to a web-client. The old application scored a 1.2/10 the web client scored a 8.5/10. Covid had a massive impact on this, as the native client worked horribly over a DNS, but it never scored a rating over 5/10.
You can certainly put up the argument that Danish development houses should get better at building native applications, and that’s a fair point. Reality is that they aren’t, however, so the fact that these same developers are also building the new and well received web-based UIs is a good way to show how the impact goes far beyond developer experience.
I think Microsoft is the only company that has continually scored well on native applications that see massive usage, because the office package has always been popular. But isn’t much of the modern office UI build with react?