I hate electron apps
The following applications I use regularly on my mac on built on electron:
- Atom editor
- Slack
- Google Play Music "Desktop"
- Insomnia HTTP client
- Part of my PIA VPN client
- Keybase
- Github Desktop (soon)
I hate them for the following reasons in loosely descending order of importance.
- They have a "Helper" process that periodically goes berzerk on my CPU for minutes on end doing God knows what
- The have an unending stream of "evergreen updates" and need to be restarted multiple times a week
- They often have some aspect of the web browser back/forward navigation which is terrible and busted and I don't want in native desktop apps
- They are large in terms of download/install size and contain tons of duplicated code for all kinds of shit chrome needs but a single-language, single-purpose native application should not
- They are slow to start up. I can remember the days when high-end Apple laptops first started getting SSDs and you could launch applications and have them fully loaded and usable in a fraction of a second. That's my standard and none of these apps come close anymore. Instead every damn time I open Google Play Music I'm treated to a 30-second spinner
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.