That's almost never the choice though is it? Who offers an Electron app and a native app?

So the choice becomes use an Electron app or something else entirely.

The choice is actually more interesting. Although big companies such as Slack potentially have resources to support development for multiple platforms, even they can implement new features faster due to Electron. Think about all those small teams that just wouldn’t be able to port their apps anywhere without it.

So in some ways I’d probably prefer a good Electron app.

For this, a mail client, I doubt there'd actually be much saving going native - it's going to need browser level HTML either way. So here Electron may have negligible cost. Thunderbird easily goes over 300M when it's been running a while for instance.

For other things I'm far less keen as Electron is often a sign of a needless memory hog - 100M pomodoro timers and such like.

Probably. Spark takes up around 200M on my laptop, so it's not that big of a deal.

Nobody, but many offer an Electron app for things where equally good native apps exist.

Not true. Look at the various Skype clients, e.g. for Linux. Memory usage ballooned after they wrote their Electron based client. It uses 4 to 5 times the amount of memory of the old Qt based client and idle CPU usage is through the roof, too. And it can't even handle long conversations smoothly.

Electron app versus using their website I guess. In which case I use their website.

But I agree, it's almost never a choice, but it's a hypothetical

All other things being equal of course not.

> All other things being equal

All other things will never be equal.

Absolutely equal no, or else it would be the same app. But that's contrived.

My point is that given two apps that both have the features a user considers "must have", few, if any, would pick the Electron one over the native, precisely because of the extra burden in cpu/memory/speed of Electron.