Hence why Visual Studio Code destroyed the editor world. As an editor it was nothing special at all; at that time it was just intellisense that blew it up IMO. People were willing to eat non-native solely for intellisense.

By now VSC has developed a moat with their incredible velocity for delivering new features, like voice chat, shared sessions, git + docker + debugger integration, etc.

By the time Nova came out they looked incredibly behind. The front page advertising their app looks cluttered with catch-up features.

This is all true, but VSCode also had a lot of money thrown at it in terms of Microsoft paying multiple teams of developers.

That is what nova couldn’t compete with.

I remember Monaco , the actual Editor inside VS Code being developed while I was in my first year of Computing Software Bachelor.

3 years later they released VS Code Alpha.

They spent millions on it.

Millions in 3 years could mean less than 5 engineers. Don’t startups typically put more ambition into their bets?

Large Corporation are not startups.

Teams in enterprise don’t have the freedom to innovate the same way startups do.

5 people for something that could never see the light , even in a multi billion dollar , was very risky and lot of money.

Obviously it’s now 1000% recouped.

It has been way more than that. (Based on conversations with a team member)

I care about native or not. I do not want inconsistent slow UI that overheats my laptop and kills its battery as if I am streaming 4K video.

Problem with that statement in this context is, that the web based solution Figma is actually more performant than the native Sketch.

Separate point, but I absolutely loathe on-screen keyboards. They reduce my phone typing speed to literally 5% of what it used to be on my old Nokia or Blackberry.

Case in point - this comment would have taken me no more than 20 seconds to type, compared with over a minute on this ridiculous iPhone keyboard that gets every third or fourth letter wrong, and just randomly decides to capitalise words in the middle of a sentence.

I’ve been gifted my last few phones, but the next one I buy, I will seriously consider one with a hardware keyboard.

I think it's an oversimplification to say that Blackberry went bankrupt because they decided to stick to keyboard. They could've innovated while keeping the keyboard.

Agree. No eco-system, no apps.

Users may (or may not!) say that they don't care about native apps... but they absolutely notice and care about whether the app is slow and awkward. Native apps are much nicer to use than the lowest-common-denominator garbage you get otherwise.

Users care all else being equal, but the point of this thread is that Sketch is not equal to Figma and being native isn't enough to overcome the difference.