In last few months, we built[1] a cross platform GUI app that generates automatic APIs over any SQL database.
Here are our key learnings :
* Building desktop apps is made up of an ecosystem which has sub optimal tools and it is very likely that it will never get better. On one end there is Electron which makes it easy to build but then if its a trivial app and your users are not likely to 've faster machines - your users are likely to suffer. Chrome the culprit is pretty much a joke. And on the other end there is QT, GTK which are awful to say the least.
* More than building, it is the publishing these apps that is painful which gets rarely discussed here. It costs you both time and money. By time, on how bureaucratic the process is involved in procuring the SSL from a licensed vendor, its verification and so on. And money to get the code signing licenses which are separate for both MAC and windows. And good luck publishing them without code signing - apss will be treated like malware by OS. However popular apps still go ahead and do this (notepad++ etc)
I would say use electron if you do not have sufficient resources to build natively for every OS. With some webpack optimizations you can squeeze in the app size to less than 300 MB but many electron apps without these optimizations go upto 650+ MB. Or else build it for MAC/Windows - release and see your adoption and take the next step.
Here are our key learnings :
* Building desktop apps is made up of an ecosystem which has sub optimal tools and it is very likely that it will never get better. On one end there is Electron which makes it easy to build but then if its a trivial app and your users are not likely to 've faster machines - your users are likely to suffer. Chrome the culprit is pretty much a joke. And on the other end there is QT, GTK which are awful to say the least.
* More than building, it is the publishing these apps that is painful which gets rarely discussed here. It costs you both time and money. By time, on how bureaucratic the process is involved in procuring the SSL from a licensed vendor, its verification and so on. And money to get the code signing licenses which are separate for both MAC and windows. And good luck publishing them without code signing - apss will be treated like malware by OS. However popular apps still go ahead and do this (notepad++ etc)
I would say use electron if you do not have sufficient resources to build natively for every OS. With some webpack optimizations you can squeeze in the app size to less than 300 MB but many electron apps without these optimizations go upto 650+ MB. Or else build it for MAC/Windows - release and see your adoption and take the next step.
[1] : https://github.com/xgenecloud/xgenecloud