And the “makes sense or not” part can change based on a bunch of factors.

It’s actually pretty common for a new company to start fully native (only iOS, few features, limited scope), then switch ro react native/electron (need to support more surfaces, features are being developed too quickly), then back to fully native (can afford individual dev teams for each platform).

> I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to have an absolute opinion on the goodness or badness of these tools.

I don't think that's necessarily true. Nuance is a thing.

These tools are bad, objectively! They give inferior user experiences, and waste resources (ever more important now with RAM prices what they are).

But that doesn't mean I can't understand or even agree with a company for using them. Building the same native application for more than one platform is expensive and time-consuming. Most of the time I'm happy to prefer an app built with a cross-platform framework vs. not having one at all.

(To be fair, though, if there's a webapp, 90% of the time I'll prefer that over an Electron app. But nothing meets a well-built native app.)

> I think people in the tech community have probably also noticed that it's rather popular to have an absolute opinion on the goodness or badness of these tools.

For a while it seemed that having deeply held, nuance-free opinions about technologies was a sign of being wise and experienced.

The slightly lighter version of this was having near-absolute convictions but leaving a tiny exception for extreme cases to try to demonstrate that you weren’t being unreasonable.

These would usually follow trends when something would spread like a meme. Recent examples include “Everyone should use SQLite for everything” and the ironically closely related “Just use PostgreSQL for everything”. The typical pseudo-nuance would be “unless you have FAANG scale” to imply that there is no nuance until your user base includes most of the developed world.

its sad that the only reason warranting this switch is AI.

I would have loved to see some performance benchmarks on some critical app flow.

Using cross-platform web technology is absolutely a nuanced engineering decision that is the right one for many businesses. What is categorically bad is bundling a standalone browser runtime for every single service, wasting user’s storage and memory when you could just have a website in a browser.

Is there any major browser now that doesn’t support saving websites as apps? Electron is simply a suboptimal and incorrect way of producing web apps.

These takes are also a bit premature. Wait until the new apps have rolled out and users are happy.

Most likely this will work out fine, but big rewrites like this have a big enough chance of going off the rails that I wouldn't shout success from the rooftops just yet. I'm sure Digg engineering was proud of their rewrite too.

Agreed. I felt the same way when a long time ago when Airbnb made a big deal of going back to native.

For companies the size of Shopify and Airbnb that makes sense. But that doesn’t mean a small ten person startup should do the same thing.

Absolute opinions are simple and travel better on media.

"The right tool for the job" is too complicated for a lot of people to understand. Tradeoffs? Tradeoffs require understanding.

"XYZ is the best, just use it" is much easier, especially if you don't know how to make decisions and don't really care. Then you defend your non-decision by parroting what you read.

I remember a product manager talking crap about Kafka years ago, and I started digging in as to why he didn't like it, and all of his reasons were marketing FUD from competitors. It was odd, his understanding of it was a Potemkin village.

All tools presumably solve a problem. If you understand that envelope you can figure out if it works for you and your envelope.

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