I guess the question would be if a larger pool of users willing to vote for native apps with their $$$ would counteract the dynamic you mention.

After all the worst possible dev environment will get extensively used if there's money to be made using it (I'm thinking of talking with PS2 developers 20 years ago…).

It's honestly not that hard for a random iOS dev to learn the macOS ropes, the principles and paradigms between UIKit and AppKit are the same and at this point both frameworks have a comparable amount of baggage and quirks. AppKit adds some complexity in some areas (window management comes to mind, which UIKit has now but no one bothers with) but helps in others (document management is still miles ahead of UIKit's).

The problem is convincing someone to try. There's a reputational issue "AppKit is haaaaard" "AppKit is baaaaad" "AppKit is dyiiiiiing". There's also a career issue as it's felt that building native mac apps is a career dead end.

I'm neutral about Swift vs. Obj-C, I can see the advantages in Swift (especially now that the language is starting to tackle concurrency and getting closer to solving its existential issues) but I miss just having a simple set of tools that would still let me do everything I needed without thinking too much about them. Too much time spent being precious when writing Swift code...

I'm more worried about Apple's mac approach becoming Windows circa 2005, currently you can develop a mac app using AppKit, which is slowly rotting away, or using either Catalyst of SwiftUI, both of which are playing catchup with iOS and not really getting there. Too many options, none that are truly polished up anymore.

Uh no. The old client's chat transcript was using WebView for display with a bunch of custom-fed CSS/HTML/DOM that was built in code. The rest of the app was good ol' AppKit.

The whole chat transcript being a web view thing was one of the main reasons the app eventually got killed in favor of a Catalyst version. There was zero expertise in the team to make all the random new transcript features that the designers kept throwing on the iOS client and there was also no way to reuse the knowledge and code of the iOS team either. Various attempts to rewrite the mac client's chat transcript to native throughout the years failed due to lack of resources and/or corporate bullshit.

> Uh no. The old client's chat transcript was using WebView for display with a bunch of custom-fed CSS/HTML/DOM that was built in code. The rest of the app was good ol' AppKit.

Yes, I overstepped, the sidebar was probably an NSTableView and the text input looked native enough. I still find it comical that the star of the show, the transcript, was a webview.

> due to lack of resources and/or corporate bullshit

I suspected as much, and again, it's comical. Trillion dollar company. Apple, of all companies, can afford to pay Meta-level comp or higher, roll out big recruiting efforts across the US and Canada and let engineers work in more cities, and yet they've only barely started in the last couple years.