Allen Pike: The Persistent Gravity of Cross Platform

In practice, the tradeoff is about more than “cheap vs. good”. Unintuitively, sometimes native tech can actually be the cheapest way to achieve a certain goal, and sometimes cross-platform technologies actually lead to better products, even for very well-funded companies. So what is a useful way to think about the tradeoff?

Over the last decade I’ve talked to people at hundreds of companies about how they’re developing and supporting apps, helping them evaluate and plan native and cross-platform app work. While there are a lot of factors that go into this technology decision, there’s one that I think is particularly illuminating.

More and more apps written with web tech (such as Electron) are showing up on the Mac desktop everyday. I understand why, but I don't have to like it.