[mike_hearn]

Thank you for your reply and I apologise if you feel offended. I was trying to summarise many experiences I've had over the years in one place and for sure, it sounds like what I've seen before doesn't apply to you.

To give a couple of examples, I've had someone tell me that they'd rather buy every dev who signs up for their platform (for free) a new iPhone, rather than write a desktop app to let them manage their API keys. I also worked on Bitcoin for a while and had to warn people that their users would lose large sums of money in avoidable ways if they implemented their idea as a web app, I was ignored because I was assured nobody downloads desktop apps anymore, and then people lost large sums of money in exactly the ways predicted. Note that Bitcoin itself was a Windows-only desktop app! This sort of thing is what I was thinking of.

Still, I'd ask you to reconsider the conclusions of your project. Yes it would of course be convenient to have it all run as a web app, but the alternative you faced wasn't a tradeoff between something more convenient and something less, it was between something a bit less convenient (albeit same number of clicks in many cases) or, apparently, nothing at all.

You clearly have the skills to try again with an alternative approach that runs outside the browser. It would be a cool feature, and even if in the end you conclude without being in-browser it's not convenient enough, it would be interesting to learn how users reacted in usability studies. I spend my time trying to make the desktop app UX as fast and smooth as possible, and if Shopify are up for the challenge then I'd be happy to work with you guys to try and build the most optimal UX possible for this project. Not every EXE is Autodesk! This kind of problem is exactly why I quit my job to make a new product for shipping desktop apps. Projects like this one don't have to wither on the vine.