There are cross platform concerns as well. If the option is to build 3-4 separate apps in different languages and with different UI toolkits to support all the major devices and operating systems, or use the web and be 80% there in terms of basic functionality, and also have better branding, I think the choice is not surprising.
In line with "the web was a mistake" I think the idea that you can create cross platform software is an equally big mistake.
You can do the core functionality of your product as cross platform, to some extend, but once you hit the interaction with the OS and especially the UI libraries of the OS, I think you'd get better software if you just accept that you'll need to write multiple application.
We see this on mobile, there's just two target platform really, yet companies don't even want to do that.
The choice isn't surprising, in a world where companies are more concerned with saving and branding, compared to creating good products.
>You can do the core functionality of your product as cross platform, to some extend, but once you hit the interaction with the OS and especially the UI libraries of the OS, I think you'd get better software if you just accept that you'll need to write multiple application.
Or you can use a VM, which is essentially what a modern browser is anyway. I wrote and maintained a Java app for many years with seamless cross platform development. The browser is the right architecture. It's the implementation that's painful, mostly for historical reasons.
But using a browser (or a VM) buys into the fallacy that your customers across different platforms (Windows, Mac, etc) want the same product. They’re already distinguished by choosing a different platform! They have different aesthetics, different usability expectations, different priorities around accessibility and discover ability. You can produce an application (or web app) that is mediocre for all of them, but to provide a good product requires taking advantage of these distinctions — a good application will be different for different platforms, whether or not the toolkit is different.
I've only done one platform gui work (python) but I'd guess this is stuff that is ripe for transpiling since a lot of gui code is just reusing the same boilerplate everyone is using to get the same ui patters everyone is using. Like if I make something in tkinter seems like it should be pretty straightforward to write a tool that can translate all my function calls as I've structured them into a chunk of Swift that would draw the same size window same buttons etc.
We get into transpiling and we essentially start to rebuild yet another cross platform framework. Starts with "read this filetype and turn it into this layout" and it ends up with "we'll make sure this can deploy on X,Y,Z,W..."
It'd be nice if companies could just play nice and agree on a standard interface. That's the one good thing the web managed to do. It's just stuck to what's ultimately 3 decades of tech debt from a prototype document reader made in a few weeks.
>It'd be nice if companies could just play nice and agree on a standard interface
They basically do though. Every cross platform native ported app I've used the GUI is the same layout. Well, except on macos the menu ribbon is on the topbar and windows it has its own ribbon layer in the application window. But that is it. All these frameworks already have feature parity with another. It is expected that they have these same functions and ui paradigms. Here's your button function. Here is where you specify window dimensions. This function opens a file browser. This one takes in user input to the textbox. I mean it is all pretty standardized and limited what you can expect to do in ui already.
There is a lot of stuff you can get done with the standard library alone of various languages that play nice on all major platforms. People tend to reach for whatever stack of dependencies is popular at the time, however.
Cross platform GUI libraries suck. Ever used a GTK app under Windows? It looks terrible, renders terrible, doesn't support HiDPI. Qt Widgets still have weird bugs when you connect or disconnect displays it rerenders UIs twice the size. None of those kinds of bugs exist for apps written in Microsoft's UI frameworks and browsers.
The problem with cross platform UI is that it is antithetical to the purpose of an OS-native UI in its reason of existence. Cross platform tries to unify the UX while native UI tries to differentiate the UX. Native UI wants unique incompatible behavior.
So the cross platform UI frameworks that try to use the actual OS components always end up with terrible visual bugs due to unifying things that don't want to be unified. Or worse many "cross platform" UI frameworks try to mimic the its developer's favorite OS. I have seen way too many Android apps that has "cross platform" frameworks that draw iOS UI elements.
The best way to do cross platform applications with a GUI (I specifically avoid cross platform UI) is defining a yet another platform above a very basic common layer. This is what Web had done. What a browser asks from an OS is a rectangle (a graphics buffer) and the fonts to draw a webpage. Nothing else. Entire drawing functionality and the behavior is redefined from scratch. This is the advantage of Web and this is why Electron works so well for applications deployed in multiple OSes.
I have created and used them. They didn't look terrible on windows.
>What a browser asks from an OS is a rectangle (a graphics buffer) and the fonts to draw a webpage. Nothing else. Entire drawing functionality and the behavior is redefined from scratch. This is the advantage of Web..
I think that is exactly what Gtk does (and may be even Qt also) too..
I think it is just there there is not much funding going to those projects. Web on the other hand, being an ad-delivery platform, the sellers really want your browsers to work and look good...
There's loads of funding. But the ones funding Qt and GTK aren't parties interested in things like cohesion or design standards. They just needed a way to deliver their product to the user in a faster way than maintaining 2-3 OS platform apps. Wanting that shipping velocity by its nature sacrifices the above elements.
The remnants of the dotcom era for web definitely helped shape it in a more design contentious way, in comparison. Those standards are created and pushed a few layers above that in which cross platform UI's work in.
Here is Bleachbit, a GTK3-based disk cleanup utility. It is a blurry mess and GTK3 Window headers are completely out of style and behavior with Windows.
> I think that is exactly what Gtk does (and may be even Qt also) too..
The problem is they half-ass it. Qt only does it with QML. Qt Widgets is half-half and it is a mess.
Overall these do not invalidate my point though. If you want a truly cross-platform application GUI, you need to rewrite the GUI for each OS. Or you give up and write one GUI that's running on its own platform.
> I think it is just there there is not much funding going to those projects. Web on the other hand, being an ad-delivery platform, the sellers really want your browsers to work and look good...
Indeed, Google employs some of the smartest software developers and ones with really niche skills like Behdad Esfahbod who created the best or the second best font rendering library out there. However, Qt has a company behind (a very very incompetent one, not just the library but operating a business). I have seen many commercial libraries too, they are all various shades of terrible.
