Aside from the improvements to project timelines, Electron and similar products are popular because they improve the developer experience, and in 2022 the developer experience is what matters the most to many software companies (yes, in many cases ahead of the customer experience).
DX directly drives engagement and retention, and good developers are hard to find (and keep!).
And like it or not, there are more and more developers entering the industry with web-only training, so we have products that reflect the stack and tooling those developers are most proficient with.
It's not just the developer experience, in fact that is probably lower on the priority than you would think. The entire business IME struggles to reason about a product, in the details, that is logically 1 product but physically N products by virtue of all the different target platforms and codebases required.
JS DX always seemed really quite bad whenever I looked. A constantly shifting landscape of frameworks and packages where nothing will stand for long before being eroded away.
> Let's just imagine for a while what UI would look like if we only had Swing (Java) or QT (C++)
I can easily imagine that, because that's more or less what we had before Electron. And it was much better, because apps (mostly) looked consistent across the OS, rather than each and every one coming up with its own custom UI theme.
At least for Qt, the answer's quite simple: you'd have KDE and the associated apps.
As for the stability of the front-end ecosystem, it doesn't exist. The many articles that were posted on HN over the years complaining about the endless quagmire of front-end frameworks, libraries and technologies explain this better than I could.
if you like the pricing and licensing, functionally QT may be for you. The web frameworks mentioned on the other hand are free to use for everybody and anything.
Qt is LGPL. You know what else requires you to respect the LGPL ? Electron becauses it is built mainly on LGPL components (Blink, FFMPEG to name the biggest ones). If you are ok with the license of Electron you are ok with the license of Qt.
The MIT license only covers what Electron adds to Blink (the rendering engine, which is under LGPL). It does not replace all the licenses of the various components used as part of Electron for which you still have to comply.
That is the exact same license than Qt, you do not need to expose your IP when using it (Tesla used LGPL Qt for their car dashboards and you don't see that IP floating around on the internet)
> Electron and similar products are popular because they improve the developer experience
> more and more developers entering the industry with web-only training
aren't these very different things? Is Electron popular because web-skill are so common, or because the dev experience is better - I sceptical of the latter, as I find JS very dependant on framework/ecosystems for compatibility.
Sorry if I implied those were tightly coupled. I do think they are related but more loosely than perhaps I meant, and not exclusively.
Electron improves DX for all the usually stated reasons (build once for many platforms, etc) but I do think there is a connection to the fact that a lot of developers out there are learning web tooling, and if a company wants to put out a desktop app in 2022, it's an easier (and therefore better for DX) path to use something like Electron or Tauri - where devs can use the skills they already have - than try to either upskill or hire a team that can build native apps on all your desired platforms.
DX directly drives engagement and retention, and good developers are hard to find (and keep!).
And like it or not, there are more and more developers entering the industry with web-only training, so we have products that reflect the stack and tooling those developers are most proficient with.