Then why are the APIs they provide such turds?

Cocoa is excellent but who knows when Apple will deprecate it for SwiftUI (which is not very good yet, if it ever will be)?

Windows is a disaster of half-finished APIs. Win32 doesn't even support dark mode. Windows Forms was on life support for ages and only now is getting some love, but it doesn't have a native look despite being built on Win32. WPF is stuck on DirectX 9 and was also on life support for a long time. UWP is dead, effectively. WinUI3 requires bundling 38MB worth of DLLs (many DLLs), is a pain to install and setup a project with and somehow performs worse than electron apps (don't look at the callstack when you click a button, it is scarier than RE9).

And Linux... well there's Qt which really wants you to drop QtWidgets and use QtQuick instead that nobody likes, and GTK is actively developer hostile with a severe disdain for backwards compatibility.

I remember the problems with the WinRT APIs being tied to specific Windows versions (still are, just a smaller surface area, so less of an issue). With the old service pack model it wouldn't be an issue but with constant OS releases it was too much churn.

I thought they had solved the worst problem with WinUI2, a bit like the compatibility library in Android, so you only had to bundle the more "volatile" bits while still delegating most things to the OS.

But then they went and threw all that out the windows (pun intended) with WinUI3 which even has its own separate implementation of DirectWrite for some god forsaken reason.

Unlike the DirectX redistributables of old it's not even backwards compatible so you can't tell people "just download the WinAppSDK runtime", they have to install the specific version you used when developing your app.

You get that download "for free" if you use a .appx, but with a regular installer you're on your own. Even the way apps link to the WindowsAppSDK is a mess with a weird bootstrapping process.

Not worth the headache.

If you use classic unstyled Win32 controls (Windows 95-2000 style) then you can do that. If you use uxthemed Win32 controls (Windows XP onwards) then there's no official dark theme support.

For those unaware, the current recommended way to develop "native" apps for Windows is to use WinUI3, distributed with the WindowsAppSDK.

Unlike regular Windows SDK, which lets you make use of the functionality provided by the OS, the WindowsAppSDK is entirely separate from the OS and requires the installation of a separate runtime on the user's machine. It also requires installing nuget packages on your machine to use it so good luck if you'd rather use straight CMake instead of Visual Studio.

As far as I can tell, there's no backwards or forwards compatibility, so the end user has to install the specific version of the SDK your app uses, or you need to bundle all the hundreds of DLLs with your app yourself.

A sane person might ask why not just use Qt (smaller distribution!) or Electron (about the same size) at that point, since they're cross platform and you can easily get fluent themes that look the same as WinUI3?

As far as I can tell there's no sane negative answer to this question. It's not like your app's "fluent theme" will be updated alongside the OS, it's no different from Qt or Electron in this regard.

There's no reason to do "native" windows development anymore, unless you mean using raw Win32 with no dark theme or a custom UI built on Direct2D/3D/Write. And if you are doing that, there's absolutely 0 reason to use this CLI.

They exist but are rare and don't hire often. I know a guy (self taught programmer) who got his first major a job at a company doing native ui (not even using OS frameworks, straight GPU stuff).

The company does highly complex simulation software used by movie studios for explosions and other effects.

He got hired by word of mouth recommendation from someone at the company that had met him.

It takes as much luck as it takes skill to get these sorts of jobs, sadly.