Just curious, would people here pay for a Windows native mail client focused on offering a great user experience? I work on multiple Windows projects and had in mind to create my own mail client since a while, but I’m skeptical people would pay for one given the number of free options already available (even if they all kind of suck IMHO).
Or asked another way, what would make you pay for an outlook alternative?
It doesn't make much sense to talk about Windows native GUI these days. There's no such thing anymore. Win32 is no longer viable due to using controls and APIs that haven't been updated for years (decades?), ropey support for hidpi displays and other basics. WinUI, the official replacement, has problems and isn't used by large parts of Windows itself anyway.
That's OK though. If you look at this thread, you can see there's been a shift in what people mean when they say "native". It used to be well defined: Win32 on Windows, Cocoa on OS X/iOS, GTK or Qt on Linux, app written in a C-derived language. Nowadays people are using it to mean "not web".
Why has this occurred, well, most people don't really care what exact libraries or languages an app uses. What they care about is the user experience. People are using the word native to mean stuff like, works offline, works with files, isn't too laggy, consumes reasonable amounts of RAM, integrates well with the OS. And above all - uses a sophisticated GUI toolkit. A big part of the native vs web experience gap is that although HTML has a lot of styling functionality it's a seriously impoverished UI toolkit, barely reaching Win 3.1 standards out of the box. So people roll their own widget toolkits that they layer on top, but none of them are all that good and the modern culture of conflating widget toolkits with design systems means they are constantly being tossed out and redone from scratch (this isn't unique to the web, Jetpack Compose has the same issue).
The result is that many widgets taken for granted by Windows 95 users like splitters, menu bars, status bars, pervasive keyboard accelerators, virtualized and editable table views, tree views, customizable toolbars, draggable tabs, floating tool windows etc are just gone and power users are the first to notice this.
You can therefore satisfy people's desire for native apps by providing that sort of UX regardless of what actual tools you use to do so.
I know, I'm familiar with the Windows GUI ecosystem and understand what people mean by native. My question was to know if people would pay for an Outlook alternative that "works offline, works with files, isn't too laggy, consumes reasonable amounts of RAM, integrates well with the OS".
I’d imagine most individuals don’t pay for Outlook either. The question you might ask is “will self employed folks or small businesses or medium businesses or large businesses buy my email client vs using Outlook they get for free with their M365 subscription and can call MS for support for?”
That said, on the Mac at least, there are a number of paid email clients that are fairly popular and seem to be sustainable, so maybe there is a market after all. I always figured those apps were more “a native app for Gmail” than for Exchange.
Or asked another way, what would make you pay for an outlook alternative?