> that has nothing to do with React and Electron
Not only that, but I think that Electron leads to the opposite problem: all apps look and behave differently, they don't follow platform guidelines, they look out of place.
> they don't follow platform guidelines
I don't think platform guidelines that anyone listens to have been a real thing for a long time. Even between apps released by MS there is little or no consistency at times, things that should be part of standard OS provided chrome like title-bars are a random mess - good luck guessing what has input focus sometimes, particularly with multiple monitors, as you unlock or switch vdesktop, without clicking to make sure.
I keep thinking of writing something that detects the top-most app window and draws an obvious box around it.
> they don't follow platform guidelines
Do platforms even follow their own guidelines? And if they do, are those guidelines good? Microsoft doesn't seem to care about UI/UX at all, Apple's UI/UX quality gets worse each year, and Linux is all over the place with each distro doing its own thing. What guidelines are those apps supposed to follow?
Looking at the current state of things, I think it's good that apps tend to do whatever they think is best for their use case. Also, most people don't switch between 100 different apps all the time.
I never had a problem with that. I want a specific application to behave the same no matter where I run it. I do not want my muscle memory for how to use an application to be confused by an application not looking or behaving the way I am used to when moving to a different platform.
Of course all the applications bundled with a specific OS should be designed to work the same and work well together. It still makes sense to have guidelines and standard widgets in a system. But I prefer very much any third-party multi-platform app to be identical everywhere I run it.
Not to defend Electron. There are many native frameworks that work the way I prefer, looking the same across platforms.