this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2025
11 points (86.7% liked)

Linux

8169 readers
318 users here now

A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system

Also check out:

Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 3 days ago

Native apps are being replaced with web apps.

Are they?

A few years ago it seemed for a while that Electron was cropping up everywhere, but it's been tapering off over the past couple of years. I don't think I've come across a new Electron app in the past several months, and every project that did start out as Electron now has several native alternatives. Riot/Element is a good example.

The trend I see is away from web apps. It's still a popular platform and for anything that is fundamentally networked I'd agree that few native apps are being developed. I haven't seen a native version of the Home Assistant client interface, for instance. But for web apps to replace native apps, there'd have to be a trend to either move native apps to the cloud, or for platforms like Electron to surge and displace native toolkits. I observe that the reverse of the latter is happening; and for the former, while there are a lot of cloud-ifying projects, I don't see that they're replacing native apps.