Native all the way, until you need text

A experienced native macOS/iOS developer describes struggling to build a simple chat app with Markdown support using Apple's native frameworks (SwiftUI, AppKit, TextKit), discovering that fundamental features like text selection and streaming performance are either broken by design or require months of work to implement. The author concludes that despite their deep platform knowledge, web-based solutions like Electron ultimately provide better text rendering, typography, and performance for rich text applications, revealing a significant gap in Apple's native development tools for modern chat-heavy applications.