Love it or hate it, Electron is now an important part of your everyday life. For those who haven’t heard of it by now, Electron is a software framework that enable developers to create desktop applications using web technologies (HTML, CSS, JS). It garnered a lot of attention in recently years.

Sure, many elitist developers have publicly spoken against it. They argue that their performance is sub par comparing to native applications, even go as far as calling Electron apps “web pages”. In reality, they were correct, and also completely missed the point. What Electron brings to the table isn’t performance, but availability. Electron massively lowered the barrier-to-entry in desktop software development, and cut the cost of porting applications across platforms to almost nothing at all. Truth is, I think what the elitist developers are so pissed off about is that fact Electron enabled ‘lesser devs’ to build beautiful, functional apps that work cross-platform, something that would take decades for them to achieve.

While I can see why the old devs are unhappy with these changes, as an end user I couldn’t be happier with Electron. It’s a godsend.

Anyway here’s my list of Electron-based apps that I couldn’t live without