Electron Remains a Scourge on Native Apps, Gruber Warned in 2018

*John Gruber’s archived post argues that Electron apps erode Mac quality even as the platform gains users who do not prize native experience.*

John Gruber republished his 2018 essay this week. In it he labels Electron a scourge while refusing to share the full pessimism of native-app advocates. The post still stands as a clear record of how one influential observer saw cross-platform frameworks damaging platform-specific software.

Gruber opens by noting the Mac’s resilience compared with Windows. He credits the platform’s appeal to users who notice human-interface violations, demand performance, and expect applications to behave correctly on the system they chose. Those users, he writes, were already present before the Mac’s popularity surge a decade earlier.

The added users brought attention from developers, yet many of those developers arrived without the same attachment to native conventions. The result, in Gruber’s view, is more Mac software that feels indifferent to the platform’s standards. He states plainly that the worst outcome for the Mac was its own success in drawing a broader audience.

Gruber stops short of declaring native apps doomed. He separates his distaste for Electron from any blanket forecast of native-app extinction. The essay therefore records both criticism of a specific technology and a measured assessment of which users still value the qualities that native code can deliver.

The original argument in full

The archived text reads: “I don’t share the depth of their pessimism regarding native apps, but Electron is without question a scourge. I think the Mac will prove more resilient than Windows, because the Mac is the platform that attracts people who care. But I worry.”

It continues: “In some ways, the worst thing that ever happened to the Mac is that it got so much more popular a decade ago. In theory, that should have been nothing but good news for the platform — more users means more attention from developers. The more Mac users there are, the more Mac apps we should see. The problem is, the users who really care about good native apps — users who know HIG violations when they see them, who care about performance, who care about Mac apps being right — were mostly already on the Mac. A lot of newer Mac u”

No later corrections or additional data appear in the source.

Limited counter-evidence

The single source contains no developer rebuttals or usage statistics. It offers only Gruber’s own distinction between his stance and the stronger pessimism of others.

Why it matters

Electron lowered the cost of shipping an application to multiple operating systems. That convenience came at the expense of memory use, input latency, and adherence to each platform’s design language. On the Mac the trade-off is especially visible because the remaining users who notice those costs still expect software to match the hardware they bought. When a larger share of new Mac buyers tolerates Electron apps, fewer developers face pressure to invest in native code. The 2018 post therefore describes a quiet shift in incentives rather than a sudden technical failure.

The same dynamic continues to shape which applications receive first-class Mac treatment and which arrive as web wrappers.

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Sources:

• Daring Fireball

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