There are many factors influencing adoption, including prior experience (I'm using it at work) and network effects (that's what my friend use). What native controls offer is seeing the whole OS as one thing. But with the advent of branding in software interface, people are expected to relearn what a control is for each software (Spotify vs Music).
> When you've got an inflexible, counterintuitive UI kit that developers must fight with to get the results the interface designer carefully put together, you hurt the usability of that tool for end users a hell of a lot more than mediocre performance does.
I have not encountered a UI kit that does not expose the 2D context to create a custom UI. But designers always want to redo native controls instead of properly using them, creating only the necessary ones. I don't believe anyone can argue that Slack UI can't be better.
Common practices do not equate to widespread approval. Most developers don't like electron-- even the ones that build with them much of the time-- but they're everywhere. Designers' opinions are no more generalizable than developers opinions.
As someone who's studied and professionally practiced interface design, I can assure you that there's nothing magical about system UI elements to the vast majority of users. Developers often focus on that because managing them is such an important part of developing interfaces, and developing with them is way easier... but in design, it's a small slice of the components that make a real difference. A lot about usability, as is the case with any other communication medium, is extremely nuanced, and native UI kits suck for creating that nuance. It's usually possible, but once again, especially now that HTML/CSS/JS isn't the accessibility catastrophe that it used to be, the extra effort to get polished results using native stuff just doesn't pay off.
As a long time developer before I became a designer, I am intimately familiar with the sort of blind spots and misconceptions developers have about interface design. Having a working mental model of software in your head significantly shifts the way someone works with computers. Developers see interfaces as a way to expose application state, data and functionality to end users, but to nontechnical end users, the interface is the application. That is not a trivial distinction. Many things most end users prefer chafe most developers. Most things that developers prefer are absolutely unusable to most non-technical end users. And most importantly, most developers assume that their technical understanding makes them better at knowing how interfaces should be designed, when in my significant experience, it makes us worse at it. The curse of expertise obviously stymies in documentation and education-- they're the two most obvious communication mediums in software. Most developers don't even consider that the interface is the most visible and consequential communication medium in any GUI application, and going based on your gut instinct about what that should be works as well as going based on your gut instinct about making a tutorial for nontechnical users. It doesn't.
I'm not saying that native controls are better because they are native. Or electron is suffering from some defects that impair usability. With equal time and effort, a software built with native controls will be more usable. A random user will not be able to distinguish which is which, but I dare say that the native ones would felt better if the only difference is what is used to build the interface.
When designing native controls and using common patterns of the OS, you lessen considerably the amount of efforts required to learn that application for the user of the platform. Most non-technical users only use one platform. Creating the same interface for two or more platforms is impairing users on that platform. And I include the web as a platform.
> When you've got an inflexible, counterintuitive UI kit that developers must fight with to get the results the interface designer carefully put together, you hurt the usability of that tool for end users a hell of a lot more than mediocre performance does.
I have not encountered a UI kit that does not expose the 2D context to create a custom UI. But designers always want to redo native controls instead of properly using them, creating only the necessary ones. I don't believe anyone can argue that Slack UI can't be better.