[abahgat]

Well, their web app tracks the history and changes of your repo hosted there. It means you see them only after you perform a push.

On the announcement they say: > But those things are only great after you've pushed your code to GitHub.

With the desktop app you can manage your local repository before pushing changes to github

[walkon]

Git is tracking the changes and history, not GitHub.

[rcfox]

Ah, that's what I missed. So it's technically possible to have all of the niceties of GitHub without having to use GitHub?

[abahgat]

Absolutely correct: GitHub just put a GUI on top on that, although it is a very neat one.