alt Hacker NewsAlmost all of Patrick's points are great if your software development goal is to make a buck. They don't seem to matter if you're writing open source, and I'd argue that desktop apps are still relevant and wonderful in the open source world. I just started a new hobby project, and am doing it as a cross-platform, non-Electron, desktop app because that's what I like to develop.
The onboarding funnel: Only a concern if you're trying to grow your user base and make sales.
Conversion: Only a concern if you're charging money.
Adwords: Only a concern if, in his words, you're trying to "trounce my competitors".
Support: If you're selling your software, you kind of have to support it. Minor concern for free and open source.
Piracy: Commercial software concern only.
Analytics and Per-user behavior: Again, only commercial software seems to feel the need to spy on users and use them as A/B testing guinea pigs.
The only point I can agree with him that makes web development better is the shorter development cycles. But I would argue that this is only a "developer convenience" and doesn't really matter to users (in fact, shorter development cycles can be worse for users as their software changes rapidly like quicksand out from under them.) To me, in my open source projects, my "development cycle" ends when I push to git, and that can be done as often as I want.
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I see a lot of this sentiment amongst developer friends but I never could relate. Its not that I'm against it or something but it just doesn't move me personally.
Most things I create in my free time are for my and my family's consumption and typically benefit immensely from the write once run everywhere nature of the web.
You can launch a small toy app on your intranet and run it from everywhere instantly. And typically these things are also much easier to interconnect.
> Analytics and Per-user behavior: Again, only commercial software seems to feel the need to spy on users and use them as A/B testing guinea pigs.
KDE has analytics, they're just disabled by default (and I always turn them on in the hopes of convincing KDE to switch the defaults to the ones I like).
They're also ubiquitous for creative works, i.e. the sort of things a small set of people spend much time on, but is not something most people use. Examples:
- CAD / ECAD
- Artist/photos
- Musician software. Composing, DAW etc
- Scientific software of all domains, drug design etcAgreed, desktop frameworks have been getting really good these days, such as Flutter, Rust's GPUI (which the popular editor (and more importantly a competitor to a webview-based app in the form of Electron) Zed is written with), egui, Slint and so on, not to mention even the ability to render your desktop app to the web via WASM if you still wanted to share a link.
Times have changed quite a bit from nearly 20 years ago.
Attitudes like these is why non-developers don't want to use open source software.
These concerns may not matter to you, the developer, but they absolutely matter to end-users.
If your prospective user can't find the setup.exe they just downloaded, they won't be able to use your software. If your conversion and onboarding sucks, they'll get confused and try the commercial offering instead. If you don't gather analytics and A/B test, you won't even know this is happening. If you're not the first result on Google, they'll try the commercial app first.
Users want apps that work consistently on all their devices and look the same on both desktop and mobile, keep their data when they spill coffee on the laptop, and let them share content on Slack with people who don't have the app installed. Open source doesn't have good answers to these problems, so let's not shoot ourselves in the foot even further.
To be fair, probably most of us here on HN write software to put food on the table. Don’t pooh-pooh our careers.
its just waaaaaay easier to distribute a web app
For some things a desktop app is required (more system access) or offers some competitive UX advantage (although this reason is shrinking all the time). Short of that user's are going to choose web 95% of the time.
Agreed.
And his point about randomly moving buttons to see if people like it better?
No fucking thanks. The last thing I need is an app made of quicksand.
Going further, if you're a hobbyist, you're probably instinctively prioritizing the aspects of the hobby that you enjoy. My first app was a shareware offering in the 1980s, written in Turbo Pascal, that was easy to package and only had to run on one platform. Because expectations were low, my app looked just as good as commercial apps.
Today, even the minimal steps of creating a desktop app have lost their appeal, but I like showing how I solved a problem, so my "apps" are Jupyter notebooks.