Sketch — Part of your world: Why we’re proud to build a truly native Mac app

For us, the ultimate benefit of being a native macOS app is that it puts the choice in your hands. Like we said above, we’re always working hard to make Cloud a great place to collaborate, but if you need to work locally in a native application on your own Mac, you always have the option. And if you prefer to store your design files on your Mac’s hard drive, a shared file server or an enterprise Box setup, you can.

Sketch is great, and if it were up to me I’d be using it at work, but despite its “Mac-ass Mac app” bonafides, Sketch being Mac-only means it was not possible to be used in an environment where people would be using Windows as well. We’re a Figma company now, and I’m largely happy with it, but I so miss things like local files and the performance benefits Sketch brought with it.

I think I’m less religious about this “Mac apps vs. web apps” war. I like fast, native apps, but I also put a lot of value in being able to access my things on every device in my life, even devices where I may not be able to install whatever software I want, or not be able to log into the same Apple ID account that I do on my personal devices.

I guess what I’m saying is I like it when services have a strong, fully-capable web app, but can be used even better with a great local app. That aside, I’d rather have an Electron app that works everywhere than a native Mac app that I can only use some of the time.