It feels like a "X is the year of the Linux desktop!" comment to make, but I'm more and more convinced that the web is will be a very viable mobile app platform soon. Progressive Web App APIs are solving a lot of the homescreen/notification/other native functionalities, and performance is always getting better.
One day there might be an opportunity for a web-focused phone OS (what Firefox OS was trying to be, essentially), but... not quite yet.
Well, I'm talking about mobile, so the Electron model isn't quite applicable. But sort of, yes. Except without the overhead of each app bundling it's own entire browser runtime.
Progressive web apps actually run in the browser (any modern browser), whereas Electron runs its own copy of Chromium and Node.js, which is why you see the bloat.
Compared to a native app web apps are bloated, slow, have foreign UIs, and are power hungry. On a desktop machine, it probably doesn't matter, but for anything battery powered it does. I'll choose a native app any day of the week over a web app.
When I see the word Electron, I just don't install the "app." I am convinced that the 3MB winamp does just a good of a job being a media player as the stupid "electron" "app" that takes 20x as much RAM.
