I guessed it was built with Electron (or at least a WebView) even before seeing the screenshots.
Creating a fully native desktop app takes a huge amount of engineering effort. When you factor in their target platforms (Windows, macOS, and Linux) you’re looking at multiplying that effort several times over. No one in their right mind would build a fully native desktop mail app these days, unless that’s the one thing that sets them apart from the dozens of other web-based mail services out there.
The only real benefit I see in this Electron app is system notifications for new emails, assuming people keep the app running in the background or minimized most of the time. Other than that, the web version will almost always be better and more up to date, since it’s clearly the main product.
I can totally picture people buying MacBook Pros with 128GB of RAM just to run a bunch of Electron apps, hehe.
I assume that this app is not a mailing app, its an app to control your fastmail service, which includes email, file storage, webhosting, various dns controls, notes, contacts, billing etc. They already contributed JMAP. It would be impossible for them to get all of those features into k-mail - k-mail wouldn't want them.
And packaging the app in electron is relatively easy and a nice convenience for some users.
That's simply not true. "we" are misusing HTML to create applications because the tooling and distribution are so good. ReactNative / NativeScript, and probably more allow you to create apps using native or html implementations of the interface.
It's just that people start with HTML, and then it's just easy so slap Electron around it.
Think of ReactNative / NativeScript like QT/wxWidgets but they are compatible with html too
Creating a fully native desktop app takes a huge amount of engineering effort. When you factor in their target platforms (Windows, macOS, and Linux) you’re looking at multiplying that effort several times over. No one in their right mind would build a fully native desktop mail app these days, unless that’s the one thing that sets them apart from the dozens of other web-based mail services out there.
The only real benefit I see in this Electron app is system notifications for new emails, assuming people keep the app running in the background or minimized most of the time. Other than that, the web version will almost always be better and more up to date, since it’s clearly the main product.
I can totally picture people buying MacBook Pros with 128GB of RAM just to run a bunch of Electron apps, hehe.