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5701652400today at 6:08 PM1 replyview on HN

cross-platform is overstatement.

can I run it on Android? iOS?

no? then 99.999999% of real world users cannot access it. and if it is desktop oly, what is the point? it is no better than web.


Replies

cosmic_cheesetoday at 6:16 PM

The needs of desktop and mobile are different enough that it's extremely difficult to build a UI framework for both that doesn't seriously compromise one paradigm or the other.

I would argue it's one of the main reasons why frameworks like Flutter stuggle with widespread adoption on desktop — it was conceived primarily as mobile-oriented, and so on desktop you're stuck with half-baked third party components for essentials such as datagrids and tree views. WinUI with its mobile heritage in UWP suffers similar problems.

GTK + Adwaita tries to straddle the fence and produces a subpar experience on both sides. Desktop data density is terrible due to mobile-minded button sizes and margins (big touch targets, bloated whitespace to make inadvertant touch interactions less frequent) and desktop-oriented widgets like tree views feel out of place on mobile.

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