[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.