I'd love to work with something that was the framework equivalent of the iOS9 UI kit produced by Teehan+Lax/Facebook, or any properly designed replica of another platform, but no one produces such things. All you're left with is mediocre rip-offs that are tasteless.
I don't want to make a Photon app. I don't want to make an Ionic app. I want to make an iOS app. If you want to compete with native, compete with native and actually try.
edit: typo
My biggest concern is how these technologies will work in the commercial world.
Do I now need to license Photon, Electron, NodeWebkit, Node, Webkit + friends?
Electron is a "competitor" to NW.js (previously known as NodeWebkit). It was developed by Github for their commercial and non-commercial applications.
There should be no concerns about using these things in commercial projects. But you don't have to take my word for it, all of these projects have open source repositories, most of them on GitHub, and you can check their LICENSE files for yourself.
Can you expand on this? I'm interested in your viewpoint because the general consensus on HN seems to be that webapps are better off as webapps and desktop apps are better off as desktop apps—being in the browser seems to be good enough for most webapps, and when packaging something as a desktop app there are little quirks that mess it up.
I don't mean throw your website behind a mini-browser and call it desktop app, but if you design a desktop application with web technologies there are some very interesting combinations.
I also think the biggest gains come from realizing this is literally just the ui. The desktop application doesn't have to be written in javascript, you can still write your application logic in c++, and all you have to do is expose an endpoint and talk over localhost!
As well as something in the way of a template for you to build on.
