Peter Lyons

I hate electron apps

May 17, 2017

The following applications I use regularly on my mac on built on electron:

I hate them for the following reasons in loosely descending order of importance.

But the thing that breaks my heart is just how poorly they compare to golden-age native OS X applications like Fantastical and other apps made by for-profit companies that directly charge a price to the end users; apps made by developers that understand why people choose OS X despite its numerous challenges compared to a PC (less hardware choice, less customization, fewer applications available, 2nd-tier support, etc). We bought Macs because the overall experience was a class above.

In contrast, Fantastical costs some money (about 2 restaurant meals worth), is 33MB on disk. Is fully loaded with my entire multicalendar data set displayed on the screen in under 2s regardless of network status, is idle when no activity is necessary, and has a nice update every several months which never contains regressions.