[TeMPOraL]

In other words: companies and individual developers alike prioritize their business needs over providing value to the users. I could stomach this excuse if people were at least honest about it.

And still, it's not applicable everywhere. E.g. if you're targeting business customers, the ones that can afford to pay you are also the ones that would be in deep trouble with the regulators if they pirated your software.

But that's just part of the problem. Unfortunately, with business customers, another big reason against desktop applications is that they can trivially work around the increasingly arcane and arguably bullshit approval and security policies corporations tend to have around installing new software. Though that seems to be changing; I've recently heard of companies using deep packet inspection to apply similar policies to SaaS webapps.

[mushufasa]

>> In other words: companies and individual developers alike prioritize their business needs over providing value to the users.

I disagree. I would say that web apps are popular because they provide more value. If/when users/companies demand native apps, developers build that instead.

Web apps are easier for users to manage (no installation, no upgrading versions) and instantly cross-platform. Installation is not trivial for a non-technical person, nor an IT manager monitoring and upgrading thousands of PCs and tablets. The natural revenue models fit because the value is recurring -- the subscription means you constantly have installation, upgrades, and data taken care of as a service.

[TeMPOraL]

And I disagree with you; asking for users to "demand" native apps is a cop-out, because no matter how loudly users scream, nobody cares. Voting with your wallet doesn't work in a non-commodity market; the supplier is in control, and you can only take it or leave it.

> Web apps are easier for users to manage (no installation, no upgrading versions) and instantly cross-platform.

That's true, with a caveat that automated, forced updates are not an universal good - both for companies and individuals they're a source of risk and frequent frustrations.

> Installation is not trivial for a non-technical person, nor an IT manager monitoring and upgrading thousands of PCs and tablets.

This was mostly solved a good decade ago. Hello screen [Next>] accept the TOS without reading [Next>] leave default settings [Next>] uncheck the sneaky toolbar some morally deficient people put in [Next>] wait for install to finish [Done]. Sysadmins had a way to batch-install software in a non-interactive way. And these days, even Windows has a package manager that allows scripted installations.

> The natural revenue models fit because the value is recurring -- the subscription means you constantly have installation, upgrades, and data taken care of as a service.

Disagree. Installation is a one-time service, updates are as often undesired as they're not, and "data taken care of as a service" is bundling in something that should stay separate, in a sneaky attempt to lock the user in and ensure a recurring revenue stream. The case is simple: businesses like recurring revenue; everything else is either facilitating or attempting to justify it.

Turning products into services is one of the most annoying and anticonsumer trends of the current age. I get that business customers like it because of accounting reasons, but it's becoming a problem for everyone else. Next thing you know, you'll have to sign a TOS to use your hairdryer as a service.