1y ago

Looking at you Ionic, Tauri, ...

Mobile Development @programming.dev

Berserker @programming.dev

1y ago

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100 comments

I fucking hate Electron
- If given a choice between an electron app and nothing, I choose the electron app.
  
  same. still dont like them tho
  
  I choose nothing.
  Or a website
  
  I'll talk nothing over a terribly implemented Electron app that devours system resources and brings every other Electron app down when it inevitably OOMs.
- You hate electron or you hate developers who make inefficient electron apps? Some examples? (Serious question, because I make electron apps)
  
  There's no such thing as a efficient electron app. First electron apps have 80MB of overhead since electron needs to bundle a whole ass browser. Also in runtime this requires 120MB of ram.
  If you really want to use webviews to make an app use Tauri.
  
  Mainly electron itself. For example the discord app (which uses electron) is less memory efficient (and much more restrictive etc.) than just a separate Firefox instance. It also had many problems with being up to date, but that's due to the discord devs deciding they want an own, custom electron, based on an outdated version. The main problem with electron for me stems from the chromium base, as basically any large app based on chromium (discord, spotify and steam) has massive flickering and performance problems on Wayland+Nvidia. A special combination, but still a factor for a 'cross platform' framework.
  On the other hand, stuff like Signal never had any problems on my machine.
  So, just use the stock electron, optimally the system one [electron binary], and see if you can enable wayland compatibility natively (otherwise we need to use environment variables etc., which works moderately at best).
  
  Developers who make inefficient apps. Most apps are sadly utter garbage
  
  Often times there's just no reason to package a web app into an app container.
  
  Yes

A pile of HTML + JS is the only cross platform GUI toolkit that's practical to deploy.
I'm not really happy about it myself, but realistically there's not any other option than just bundling a website into a wrapper.
And to pre-empt any replies; your proposed solution must support Windows, Linux (X11 and Wayland), MacOS, iPhone, Android, Chromium and Firefox.
- Java, of course. /s
  
  3 billion devices can't be wrong!
- And to pre-empt any replies; your proposed solution must support Windows, Linux (X11 and Wayland), MacOS, iPhone, Android, Chromium and Firefox.
  If you are a website, that's easy, you are actually making the correct choice with Electron insofar that you want a browser.
  If you're doing an application not a webpage, then we're walking W+L+Mac+Phones, that's more tricky. I'm assuming for a second you want a usable UI (otherwise we'd be using Electron again :P ) so we're talking two applications at least, one for mobile, one for desktop + maybe iPads.
  And then it's usually already too pricey to bother:
  Web frontend devs are far cheaper than application developers.
  Might as well just do a website, runs in everything. Only need to develop once.
  Updating is immediate with a website, don't have to do any deployment/upgrade/downgrade plans.
- I think Flutter and Avalonia both tick all those boxes.
  
  Does Avalonia support Wayland? Last time I checked it wasn't complete yet.
- If you count browser engines, don't forget Webkit.
- Why is Firefox a 'platform'? I'm assuming chromium is for chromeOS devices, but I don't know of any device that just runs Firefox.
  
  they probably meant web versions of the app that run both on chromium and gecko (firefox) browser engines
  
  As Communism said, yeah I was ment a web application. No need to spend dev time working on a different version of your app if you can just reuse the web version.
- Chromium and Firefox are web browsers, of course they only support HTML+JS. That’s what they were designed for.
  
  of course they only support HTML+JS.
  WebAssembly is becoming more popular, which lets you run code written in languages other than JavaScript in a browser. It's not possible to do everything yet, so you still need some JS code and a bridge between the WASM and JS, but it's getting there. Emulators that run in the browser often use it.
- Avalonia and Uno Platform if you are working with C#
- Raylib.
- qt?
- I know the guy working on makepad is trying to solve this problem along with vr headsets, Apple tv, etc. It's really painful because of dependency bloat messing with build times so he ended up rewriting a bunch of things 🤷‍♂️.

"Here's a website that you needed to install on your phone to see!"
- They want you to install the app so they cand send you notifications/ads.
  
  Yup. That plus steal all your contacts and anything else they can get direct or indirect permissions for.
- using a phone to browse the internet
  i seriously hope you guys don't do this
  
  Definitely! I work at a computer 8-10 hours per day, 5 days a week. The last thing I want to do when I'm done working is sit at computer some more. I do almost all of my browsing on my phone. Firefox Mobile Nightly, plus NextDNS, plus Nord VPN, plus uBlock origin, plus a fake user agent string. I'm pretty secure on my phone.
  
  Bruh. Phones are just essentially ARM + Linux pocket PCs.

I though the same but I tried Tauri and it makes sense. Unlike electron you're not shipping the entire browser with your app and the the low level stuff is just rust so the integration is nice and easy. And using webview for UI? Why not? The reactive libraries are actually nice to work with, it's easy to customize, you have all the tools to inspect/debug your code. It's definitely better then trying to fit GTK into rust.
- I'm using Tauri to play around with Rust. I like it so far.
  I always thought it uses far fewer resources than electron.
  
  What are you using from UI? JS or also Rust?

If you don't like webapps, make native UI frameworks easier to use and cross-platform...
- lol they did, that's what webapps RUN ON. TBH I don't get the original complaint. Lots of people have bad webapps; back when native apps were the norm, lots of people had bad native apps. It's not really a problem with the runtime framework.
  
  They run on them, but its not that easy compared to a web app. Why isn't everyone programming in machine code? Every other language literally runs on it. There is a reason we use abscractions.

Steve Jobs in 2007:
The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, they can send an email, they can look up a location on Google Maps.
And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today. So developers, we think we’ve got a very sweet story for you. You can begin building your iPhone apps today.
Admit it, the man was a visionary... XDDDDD
Just in case: /s
- He was late to the party. Everyone by that time was trying to make applications and web development converge. Mozilla had an entire framework derived from the web.
  
  By the year, I think this was before there was even an App Store (first generation iPhone was launched at the end of June, 2007). Jobs really believed in web apps, but the original iPhone had no power to handle them correctly, and a lot of the APIs that we have now were unthinkable at the time. I was just trying to be funny, really. :P

You mean, it's all Electron? 🌍👨‍🚀🔫👩‍🚀

Spend 500 hours re-engineering your application for each platform
Just using ten year old proven technology that's built on a universal backwards compatible framework
- I, too, love me some Qt... but I thought this discussion was about electron.
- You say that, but it seems every major electron update will break your app.
  
  Sure. But that's one point of failure relative to the N points tied to each major update to a "supported" platform.

At least webviews don’t (yet, Google be trying) have the ability to request attestation & ban me for not using the stock, bloatware OS every device comes with. Bonus that I get to keep my data inside the browser’s sandbox; it’s the easiest way to be safe with proprietary software.
If only my bank could get the memo & make their website not suck (it legit checks for Netscape Navigator 4 in the source) so I can be at peace with microG+LineageOS in the phone space (all the banks here do it & I already switched once until my bank, slowly but inevitably ‘modernized’ their app).
- But my beloved Netscape! How will I possibly learn a new browser? I'm too old to learn!

We switched to Flutter, works great for IOS and Android, but the website is trash.
- I tried Flutter and hated it. It was buggy (there's thousands of post on the internet saying that you have to do 'rm ios/Podfile && flutter build ios' and similar. the build breaks often and standard solution is 'turn it off and on again'), the components library is too verbose and not nice to work with, the support was bad (as in open a bug report with example repo and they would react after 6 months) and everything that's not 'hello world' was complicated or impossible (like writing tests). I'm definitely not using it again.
  
  We had a third party do the development, it worked out really well. At some point I'll need to learn it when we take it over.

Tauri uses the OS's built in webview libraries as opposed to bundling a whole browser engine like electron. It's still not as good as native in terms of size and speed, but it should be a lot better than electron.
- If you're going to create a desktop app in JS, React Native is better as it can use native UI elements. It does mean that the UI code may differ a bit between platforms, but you can still reuse most of your code between platforms.
  Otherwise, C# with Uno Framework or MAUI looks promising for cross-platform dev.
  
  C#
  Uno
  MAUI
  promising
  meanwhile microsoft themselves migrate away from that in favor of chromium/electron in Teams, Outlook and whatever else they ship

100 comments