from wikipedia:
Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster
hardware doesn't degrade, yet a lot of devices, that felt very snappy in the beginning, that are merely 5 years old feel outdated and slow, because if a trillion dollar corporation can't be bothered to write a native application, and graces us with a control bar widget that's an entire chromium browser, whose only purpose is to push two buttons, then very few others will be
on mobile, because developers are practically forced to write an app for absolutely everything, and there are easy to use tools available that will take your js and compile it into native components (like reactnative and nativescript), otherwise your app will be crippled, it is less pronounced on mobile in my opinion
on desktop, because you can write applications however you want, every bloody thing is in electron: chat apps, text editors, IDEs and even terminals and browsers (lol), it's a complete disaster in my opinion, even a person like me, who wages holy war against electron apps, is forced to use a couple electron applications (looking angrily at you discord and zoom ๐ก)
the problem is that most people start with (and never go on from) javascript as their first (and final language), which is an interpreted language, made to be run in a browser, that was designed in like two weeks, and the expectations are sky-high (apps that utilize native components across five operating systems and two processor architectures), and the unfortunate result of these requirements is electron
there are some emerging solutions like extremely cross-platform flutter (but it's not js) and there are now native macOS and windows targets for react native, but it's rarely used
it seems like unless there will emerge some framework, that would magically sip out the project from the developer's mind in js and transform it into native apps for ios, android, linux, macOS and windows, with zero modifications required from the developer, we have little hope, and such a framework would not only be a silly project, but also an effort of astronomical proportions
so we're stuck with either iron grip control of corporations over mobile platforms that force everyone to write an app for everything, or with the freedom of the desktop, but we end up running 15 instances of chromium, not to mention the fragility of the web standards nowadays
what do you think?
The unavoidable fact is that supporting nice nimble native APIs for every OS is more work than targeting electron. The best thing any individual can do is help with that work - support software that compiles to native APIs, e.g. if you Matrix consider using/contributing to nheko instead of Element.