alt Hacker NewsIf you think too hard about this, you come back around to Alan Kay's quote about how people who are really serious about software should build their own hardware. Web applications, and in general loading pretty much anything over the network, is a horrible, no-good, really bad user experience, and it always will be. The only way to really respect the user is with native applications that are local-first, and if you take that really far, you build (at the very least) peripherals to make it even better.
The number of companies that have this much respect for the user is vanishingly small.
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Software I don’t have to install at all “respects me” the most.
Native software being an optimum is mostly an engineer fantasy that comes from imagining what you can build.
In reality that means having to install software like Meta’s WhatsApp, Zoom, and other crap I’d rather run in a browser tab.
I want very little software running natively on my machine.
Yes because users don't appreciate this enough to pay for the time this takes.
>> The number of companies that have this much respect for the user is vanishingly small.
I think companies shifted to online apps because #1 it solved the copy protection problem. FOSS apps are not in any hurry to become centralized because they dont care about that issue.
Local apps and data are a huge benefit of FOSS and I think every app website should at least mention that.
"Local app. No ads. You own your data."