[flukus]

> Would any of the rapid feature iteration and widespread adoption have happened if this theoretical application was _initially_ created as a native app?

Yes. Desktop applications can be just as quick to develop and iterate on as web based ones. Slapping together a winforms UI in visual studio is still the quickest way to get to MVP status.

[untog]

But how do you manage deployment of a new version? That's where the web comes into its own.

[flukus]

Deployment is definitely harder, but not to the point where it's unmanageable. Click once is one solution that's very common, though not great. It will check a url for a new version at startup and install that version. This URL can be a simple aspx page that gives each user the right version, I recently automated this as part of our CI deployment.

A better solution would be something like chocolatey (https://chocolatey.org/), which is basically a package manager for windows. It doesn't do the automatic updating, but doing that with a remote powershell script should be doable.

For some perspective though, if you automate this as part of a CI builds it should be a once off cost, it's not a justification to make something a web app instead.

[stephenr]

There are multiple solutions for handling updates of native apps.

Managing updates to a cluster of backend servers is at least as difficult, because they usually have shared state (a database).