The native world also refuses to create a standard UI API, making everyone use either Qt or Electron because sorry writing it over again for each platform is a hard “no.” Not even big companies do that anymore.
Yes. Not only are they refusing (and have been for decades) to create a standard UI API, they are 1. actively making their own UI APIs as different as possible from one another, even down to requiring different programming languages to use them, and 2. killing things that they once supported, which ease cross-platform code (both major platforms walking away from OpenGL in favor of their incompatible native APIs).
Not only that. There are people who go to great lengths to make sure that native apps don't work properly across desktop environments even on the same OS. They also call out anyone who dares to complain about it.
Why would platform maintainers want to encourage the lowest common denominator apps that such an API would undoubtedly result in (as a standardized UI API by definition cannot leverage platform strengths)?
Apps like that get made anyway but as it stands at least there’s a healthy crop of smaller/indie native alternatives which often best the behemoths in UI/UX. That would likely disappear with the addition of a standardized UI API, as it would probably also come with the abandonment of the old specialized APIs.
