[gizmo]

Frankly, I think efforts like these are misguided.

We are collectively rewriting desktop apps to run in the browser, where not only it runs 50x slower than on the desktop, but all data has to be downloaded time and again from servers. The amount of waste here is staggering. And yet, desktop apps have so many issues (installation/breakage/crashes) that web apps are the only way to deliver software that just works.

Web developers can, and should, build light and fast websites. But the average person runs spotify, youtube, netflix and other streaming services pretty much 24/7. A slightly faster personal blog isn’t even a drop in the bucket.

And waste from computing, bad as it may be, pales into comparison to the waste of a “quick trip to the store” with a 4 ton truck.

As software engineers the best thing we can do is to write good software that lasts and that solves real problems. Climate guilt really doesn’t come into play here.

[daydream]

> And yet, desktop apps have so many issues (installation/breakage/crashes) that web apps are the only way to deliver software BNb that just works.

I never have any installation or breakage issues with desktop apps and crashes are very few and far between nowadays.

In contrast so many websites track every single little action I do, waste massive amounts of energy on said tracking/showing ads/invading my privacy, and have a crap user experience chock full of dark patterns.

I’ll take desktop apps any day of the week, thanks.

[yakubin]

> desktop apps have so many issues (installation/breakage/crashes

Day-to-day I use a Mac. Installation is me dragging an icon to a folder. Sometimes I use Linux or FreeBSD. There installation is a single command. I don’t see the problem. Difficulty/effort level is equal to bookmarking a website. Indeed, with PWAs it’s literally the same thing. The meme of installation being hard needs to die. First lack of it was born as a made up advantage of webapps, and then webapps copied it.

Breakage/crashes — same thing happens with webapps, but is more frequent, annoying and silent (as in: often you don’t get a popup that something crashed, instead clicking on things stops effecting anything, buttons are randomly marked inactive, scroll is broken), not to mention terrible responsiveness.

[pocketarc]

> The meme of installation being hard needs to die.

I think that meme is just people trying to come up with rational reasons for the death of native apps where there are none. The reality is that it's more expensive and takes longer for a big businesses to build a different native app for each OS, so they push web apps. It also takes longer for smaller devs to build multiple native apps, so they push web apps.

That's what it comes down to. If you're building an app like Discord, you can write native clients for macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, and Android, OR you can write a single React app, throw in a bit of React Native and a few OS-specific tweaks, and you've got all 5 platforms covered.

There's no big conspiracy. Desktop apps aren't worse. It's just business.

[kitsunesoba]

The only desktop apps that match OP’s description that I’ve used are old giant “ball of mud” codebases like Adobe and Autodesk stuff, but thankfully my need to use those specially has been low in recent years thanks to more lightweight and well-behaved alternatives like Affinity Photo and Pixelmator.

[EliRivers]

desktop apps have so many issues (installation/breakage/crashes) that web apps are the only way to deliver software that just works.

I wonder if this will always be the case, or if we just need to keep going for another order of magnitude or two before we manage to render web apps as painfully difficult for ourselves as we've made the desktop.