Discord is on a quest to become a better messaging app

misk@sopuli.xyz to Technology@lemmy.world – 209 points –
Discord is on a quest to become a better messaging app
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Here's an idea to start making it better: ditch fucking electron. There are alternatives that won't need complete code rewrite or language change (tauri, neutralino). Better yet, actually go ahead with a full language change and pick Dart + Flutter, that shit is crossplat.

But we all know they won't, because fuck you, "ram is cheap". Good luck upgrading the ram on your phone.

It run fine on my 7 years old phone. Sure, native would be better, but electron mean they can make the website, the windows app and the android app all at once. So it's worth it. Everyone on Lemmy is a programmer, so you should know how hard it is to support multiple version of a service with as much active developpement as discord.

The point of Tauri and Neutralino is to do what Electron does without needing to bundle a whole, isolated chrome browser to make it pretend it is a native app

I didn't know about that, sorry I missed it in you original comment. Then maybe theses frameworks are too young or have some kind of limitation, or just discord did not switch yet, but I hope they do. I know optimisation is not important for most company but if the switch is free they should do it.

They would have to change some parts that interact with the OS. It's probably not a big investment (especially for a company like Discord) but there are few reasons to do so, it won't increase users (by much) and doesn't affect revenue.

It still increase user experience so they would do it if it was easy. Or more like I would like so.
Except if we go full conspiracy theory and maybe they don't want poor people that won't buy nitro on the platform, it's possible.

Except if we go full conspiracy theory and maybe they don’t want poor people that won’t buy nitro on the platform, it’s possible.

Nah, most people just don't care that it uses electron.

I still run the last pre-JS version of the discord app on my phone, and it's sooo much snappier.

I didn't know it used to be on native, maybe I will try finding it so I can save some space

They used to be native with Kotlin on Android and IDK on iOS. Now they use React Native, which isn’t really electron or native. I’m not sure if it bundles a browser but it sounds like the same as Tauri and Neutralino