For a long time, cross-platform app development felt like choosing the least painful compromise. You could maintain separate native apps for every platform and duplicate a lot of logic. Or you could use a cross-platform framework and accept its trade-offs: runtime overhead, abstraction leaks, slower access to new platform APIs, and an app that sometimes felt native-adjacent rather than native. Electron, Capacitor, CEF, React Native, Flutter, and Compose Multiplatform all solved real problems. They still do. The point is not that these tools are bad. The point is that the center of gravity is shifting for a certain class of apps: developer tools, terminals, editors, local-first software, creative tools, and other products where performance, platform feel, and long-term control matter. A different architecture is becoming more practical: one shared systems-level core, surrounded by thin native UI layers. The core is usually written in Rust, Zig, C++, or another systems language.…