Electron is Flash for the Desktop[1]. It is cheap to implement. It wastes resources, doesn’t integrate natively and is a security problem.

As usual the industry safes money and the customer has to pay for the memory. I’m sick of applications which doesn’t adapt to HiDPI (automatically) and consume 500 MB of memory whereas a C/C++, Rust or even Python with Gtk or Qt will consume about 50 MB.

Aside from that Postman has become unusable because the company behind it want to earn „now“ money. I don’t say HTTPies UI is bad it just not what users want.

[1] http://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/

It's only a tradeoff because for some reason we decided, collectively, that writing native apps is impossible.

We did multi platform apps when we still called them programs. We used some cross platform toolkits with either cross platform UIs that felt out of place everywhere or a layer that hooked to a common subset of the native ones, with maybe an option to go really native. We wrote C or C++, mostly.

Then HTML became that common subset of the UI and the browser JS runtime and rendering engine replaced the cross platform toolkit. Bloated, not optimized for space and time as it could be, etc, but very convenient.

Microsoft lost the plot with their app frameworks for local apps so electron not so bad and gets you cross platform

Which apps in this space are native? I vaguely remember paw.cloud (RapidAPI) being native, but that was before the rebranding.

Yes, paw was (is?) a native macOS app.

Kreya isn't based on Electron, but uses the native WebView of the OS.

Yes, Paw is native.

For an app that is all about web requests and API testing it actually makes a lot of sense.