Yours truly, back in 2018:
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.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 users either don’t know or don’t care
about what makes for a good Mac app.
This eight-year-old piece holds up well. My concern was justified, but so too was my lack of defeatist pessimism. Truly native, idiomatically correct Mac-assed Mac apps are resurgent. Electron and is brethren non-native frameworks have not receded, but they haven’t gained further ground. For every Claude (Electron) there’s a ChatGPT (AppKit). I’m seeing more new good Mac apps released today than I was in 2018, and longstanding Mac stalwarts continue to thrive.
Apple itself is a good example. The Mac version of Journal, first introduced in MacOS 26 Tahoe, is a profound disappointment — not just because of serious bugs but because it’s un-Mac-like in sad ways. You can’t open an entry into its own window, for example. But the brand-new Siri app in the developer betas of MacOS 27 Golden Gate is pretty Mac-like. You can double-click chats in list view to open them in their own windows, for example. (You can’t double-click chats in grid view to open them into windows, though — presumably a bug.) Siri is not a great Mac app but it does feel like a Mac app, and it’s only a 1.0 in its second developer beta. It doesn’t feel like an iOS app running in a Mac window, like Journal does.
The ironic frustration with Anthropic’s Claude app being an Electron turd is that Claude and especially Claude Code are so capable of helping to create good native Mac apps. It’s one thing for a big company or organization with cross-platform aspirations but no institutional Mac expertise, like Notion or Slack or Discord, to choose Electron to create their Mac client. It’s another when it’s a company like Anthropic, whose only product’s single most impressive ability is generating programming code, including high-quality AppKit and SwiftUI code for the Mac. To return to my hammering-screws-into-the-walls metaphor from yesterday, it’s as though the building into which Anthropic decided to hammer all the screws is a renowned screwdriver factory.
