The death of native Mac apps?

I’m a longtime Mac user, although admittedly, I did not own one of the older Macs. Macs came into my mainstream purview only around 2006 when I was transitioning from an IBM ThinkPad. I became envious of the fancy dock and cool-looking interface of Mac OS, but once I got hooked on it, I navigated all of my workflows around the Mac. I’ve seen it transition from the Aqua interface to what we have now, through all of the skeuomorphisms, including the Notepad which included grids and a handwriting font, a yellow background, and a leather-like interface for the calendar to mimic an actual handheld calendar.

So, I’m quite appreciative of native Mac apps. Some of my favorite native Mac apps have a flavor of comfort and fluidity that I think most developers who are building apps for multiple different operating systems simply don’t appreciate. If you think about Apple’s stock apps, including Mail and Notes, they provide such a fluid way of working that it’s almost incomparable to every other app out there. Apple’s native Safari is a fluid and beautiful experience to browse the web. Some things come close, but they just don’t quite cut it. I have a number of other browsers on my Mac because I sometimes like to see the performance of websites on different browsers, but even considering something like Firefox and Chrome, Safari just beats all of these out of the water. There are other beautiful Mac apps, of course, like the new document developing platform Craft, but then I’ve started to notice that the apps that I need and use the most are now turning out to be based on Electron. This includes Obsidian as well as the Notion app, which is really a wrapper for the web interface for Notion. It allows some things to be done in a native way like drag-and-drop, but in small things, it is noticeable that these are not native Mac apps.

I blame Apple for providing this lightweight way to build apps, but then I also understand the pressure that the developers face in terms of rising development costs and fixing bugs. It’s much easier to have a core code component that can be deployed on multiple platforms rather than labor and change the appearance and development of the app per platform. In the end, I think the popularity of these Electron apps for some capabilities will make them the mainstream apps on Apple.

I have now swapped my mail application for the alternative Spike, which again is not a native app. So, apart from Safari, at the moment, practically all my productivity is happening on non-native apps. I don’t use Apple Notes anymore simply because its export functionality is terrible, and it doesn’t play nicely with other apps. And as I mentioned in other blog posts, I’ve been using markdown-based apps such as Obsidian and Notion. So, Safari is the only app of note that is native.

Maybe Apple thinks this is the future for apps, but that seems silly. Why provide these powerful native capabilities if all the key productivity apps are going to be non-native? It’s almost like they’re laying the pathway for Google Chrome’s vision that everything can be deployed in the browser, and that’s more than sufficient. Granted, some of the Electron apps are not quite that severe, but it isn’t too much of a step to imagine they will get there someday.