Ask Paul: May 15 ⭐️

Happy Friday! We're flying back to the United States as I write this, so let's get this weekend started early. I don't know about you, but I have days of sleep to catch up on.
🧑‍💻 Going native
madthinus asks:

With Microsoft “all in” again on native apps, is this work simply to enable modern API’s for the Windows Interface / Build in apps that does not rely on bloated HTML5 frameworks or JavaScript engines? I can see this benefitting Windows and Xbox interfaces. I can also see that reliability of the Start menu going up.

I assume it's obvious I obsess over this topic.

This is a difficult one for me. I've been "researching" (what we call "reading" and "watching YouTube videos" now) related topics all year and tied to all kinds of things: A coming nostalgia focus month and the next programming project most obviously, but also whether something cross-platform makes sense. I looked at Flutter again recently and then Kotlin/Jetpack Compose this past week anticipating future Android laptops. And, while this will irk those who dislike web technologies, React Native.

First, two points to the "native app" thing that I didn't raise Native Apps? It’s a Trap! ⭐️: This is not official policy for Windows 11 per se, though obviously the "pain points" changes and subsequent communications did indicate that some of the performance work will include removing things like the web-based code used for Recommendations and probably elsewhere in Start. And this isn't even official policy for Microsoft broadly; Rudy Huyn, who I do not trust, tweeted this foolishly, in my opinion, to energize the fanboys. He came up in the world as a Windows Phone developer–Microsoft used to pay him to copy apps from other mobile platforms–and this is his mindset. He's not a web guy.

But there's more.

Office adopted web technologies broadly for good reasons, and while I know everyone hates the new Outlook, to me this is more about an extensibility model that works across platforms because they have apps on Windows, Mac, the web, Android, and iPhone/iPad. So the "all native apps" thing must appear cute to the Office folks. That ship sailed. But there's also Copilot, which is a cross-company effort, and that has the same needs/concerns.

This past week, we started hearing about the work Microsoft is doing to speed up launch experiences across apps and system components in Windows 11 by implementing a low-latency profile. That will likely help with the launch performance of many of the web apps in Windows, none of which I think to start slowly, or whatever other web-based experiences there are in there too.

This is classic Microsoft communication. As a company, Microsoft does not have a new app development framework and my guess is it never will. Having used the Windows App SDK/WinUI 3.0, I can speak to how horrible it is, and how difficult it is to move existing codebases forward. So this one guy tweets about all native apps, and God help anyone who looks into...