Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

I don't even know what the argument is either.

Vendor lock-in on behalf of Apple, Google, and Microsoft, sure. But then:

> but all frameworks are guilty. Electron, Capacitor, Tauri, Xamarin, Qt, NativeScript, the lot.

Well, these all solve entirely different problems. Different problems, different solutions. Not sure what the "lock-in" is here. It's like arguing that there is "lock-in" because one project is written in C# and the other in Javascript. Seems like stretching the concept of "lock-in" too thin.

> What I’d really rather see more of is standalone platform-agnostic modules

This is a false proposition. A phone is very different from a desktop. "Platform-agnostic" would mean a denominator so common that it isn't useful for anything. Again, different problem/hardware, different solution.

The rest of the post just devolves from there.

The lesson is that you can get great cross-platform UX if you have a massive budget. There’s some cross-platform UI code, sure, there’s also duplicated work.

Photoshop was originally written using MacApp, so it must have gone through some extensive, extensive changes to get its first Windows version.

How did things end up this way? I'm massively frustrated by the stupidity of our security team and it gets worse each year. And I've tried to explain this stuff about web apps exactly like you just did but it never quite gets through, and when it does it gets a response like "well, we should probably find a way to restrict web apps as well".

I know for a fact that none of the people doing systems administration that install this junk endpoint management software actually want to install it. And it's laughable that corporations can simultaneously claim to be implementing zero trust, while at the same time giving crowdstrike software more trust than anything ever had before everybody decided they wanted to chase buzzwords. It can take weeks for me to get a new hire set up with WSL right now. If I didn't like the people I work with I would have jumped ship a long time ago.

Security teams have managed to threaten and bully their way into having more power than anybody else in IT. All the big stories about hacking is certainly part of it, but honestly I don't think that fully explains it. If I was a CIO paying an enormous amount of money for endpoint management and then saw something like solar winds happen, I'd probably have fired everybody on the security team that advocated those sorts of security strategies.

In my mind, security is something that should happen deep in the backend and be handled mostly by programmers, DBAs, and the admins that handle application servers. Once the data has left those environments with somebody it shouldn't have you have already lost. No hacker has ever said "I breached the database, but then got stopped from exfiltrating data because somebody made it so the USB sticks don't work".

> This explains why so many people use Electron and just embed a web browser

I would wager there are 100x the number of Qt/GTK apps than there are electron apps. That number could go up or down by an order of magnitude, and the older widget-based toolkits would still be ahead. So ... I don't think that citing numbers of developers doing X or Y is helpful here.

> React Native is more of a framework that uses native toolkits to begin with, so it starts out with much better alignment with platform expectations

More similar to WxWidgets then, which uses native widgets but wraps them in lowest common denominator API. For one reason or another WxWidgets hasn't been as successful as one might expect.

Anyway, as I've noted elsewhere in this thread, the majority of creative apps (including Logic) barely use any of the native toolkit within their main windows. Almost all DAWs, drawing programs and image editors just treat their windows as a big 2D drawing surface, and do their thing without regard for UI/UX widgets or rules designed around productivity/business/system utility apps. The "native" aspect kicks in only when they interact with the rest of the desktop environment, and they vary quite a bit in how native they go (they also keep changing this; Logic has gone back and forth with using the native file browser vs. an app-specific one several times over its life, and in different contexts within the app).

This also has implications for the extent to which Qt/GTK/etc. toolkits impact the UX. If someone writes a widget-heavy app, then the toolkit design & implementation will have a strong impact. If the widgets are limited to some toolbar at the top, it doesn't really make a lot of difference as long as the devs get system tray/notification right, and don't screw with window management.

Content streaming is one case where I wish,wish,wish they were non-closed ecosystems.

Make your offerings available via an API. Make the actual content stream with whatever DRM standards you (the "platform") need to feel comfortable.

Let me wrap all my streaming services with a single platform, having decent search and ability for me to do automatic price arbitrage. Why rent on Netflix when it's free this week on Hulu?

It could be so much better, but it's not.