Well, nothing really, but it depends. It’s a way of creating an application that is effectively a web app wrapped in a native wrapper.

There are some (not many) that do this very well, but then a lot of developers (actually, to be honest, mostly companies) that take a slapdash approach by wrapping a web app in Electron and then proudly saying “we have a desktop app”. And while they kind of do its often resource intensive, feels poorly implemented, and doesn't take advantage of OS APIs properly.

So (ignoring the resource usage, which is a whole other issue), I personally tend to find them to not fit into the way I work enough. For example I make really heavy usage of the share extensions in macOS to send things to my notebook (in this case), and I don’t know of any Electron applications that allow this. That’s just one example of a really useful OS API that an electron application probably won’t take advantage of.

All that said, I am an extremely old school computer user, and I like native, offline applications… And am increasingly in the monitory 😆.