Developers, Stop Making Bloatware

It’s okay to make hybrid desktop apps. But never let them become bloatware

Shalitha Suranga
NeutralinoJs

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Photo by Kai Pilger on Unsplash

About a decade ago, we had a golden era with pure native desktop applications. However, hybrid applications became popular over native applications due to the easiness of development, beautiful graphical user interfaces, and impressive cross-platform support. Native applications are undoubtedly great from the technical perspective because of their great resource usage, unlike hybrid applications. We all can use hybrid applications without any visible problem because our powerful hardware solves performance issues coming from common hybrid apps.

A few years ago, I tried to use the desktop application of Slack. Thereafter, I found that it was written using the Electron framework which ships a whole browser and a runtime (Node.js) along with each application. This situation popped out a nice question. Why do I need to install a web browser again even if I already have a web browser installed?

Bloatware is bad

If a particular software abnormally uses a lot of the physical resources of the computer over the usability, the specific software is often identified as bloatware. In fact, every software that consumes a lot of resources is not bloatware. For example, if a video editing…

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Shalitha Suranga
NeutralinoJs

Programmer | Author of Neutralinojs | Technical Writer