People choose Electron because they already know how to write Chromium apps (web dev). It’s really just ease of development, using another framework takes more specialized skills than using Electron.

That’s why everything is Chromium these days.

Options:

Native app for each platform:

• Pros: native code is going to be the fastest possible to run and have the smallest dependencies
• Cons: have to write all your code 3+ times in different languages, have less time to develop new features and optimize existing code.

Progressive Web App:

• Pros: single app, write once runs anywhere, no signing keys, no lock in, can be hosted anywhere, runs on everything
• Cons: artificially limited by Apple on iOS, doesn’t have access to deep operating system resources, only what’s exposed through the browser, limited multithreading capabilities

React Native:

• Pros: single app, write once, runs anywhere, similar enough to React Web that a lot of developers will have an easy time learning it
• Cons: still kinda finnicky, not super easy to make it work and perform well across all platforms, you’ll probably still end up having to write some native code, not actually CSS / React Web so still a bit of a learning curve coming from there

Qt:

• Pros: single app, write once, runs anywhere, low level / compiled means that it will be small and performant
• Cons: written in C++, harder to find developers for, harder to implement modern out of the box niceties that CSS gives you for free, poor devX compared to react

.NET MAUI (formerly Xamarin):

• Pros: single app, write once, runs anywhere, low level / compiled enough to be more performant than most web apps out of the box, well documented
• Cons: written in C#, easier to find devs for but not many experts in it specifically, MVVM model is not as pleasant of a devX as React, again no css

Electron:

• Pros: single app, write once, runs anywhere, has full access to operating system resources and deep multithreading if needed, can be as simple as web app in a container or as complex as something like VSCode.
• Cons: takes up more storage and ram since you’re bundling chromium with your app