[seanwilson]

I notice HN comments often that say people want and appreciate native apps/UI, people don't like web apps, and people don't want files stored in the cloud. I think Figma proves these aren't things non-tech people care about when a web app is done well, similar for Google Docs.

The ease of collaboration in teams, and being able to just click a link on any platform to preview or start working on a design without installing anything is a killer feature.

The risks of vendor lock-in, losing control of your files, or price hiking sucks though, but convenience outweighs this for most. Coming from a dev background, I'd love open file formats and being able to pick where the files are stored though.

> …and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.

I have to use both and switching to Adobe for stuff is painful and feels so archaic now because you lose the ability to have multiple people live edit/preview a document, you have to muck around with syncing files + installing, there's no free plan, and nobody on Chromebook or Linux can use it.

For example, it's so much easier, faster and with better results to just let a client edit copy directly on a design, rather than the clunky way of having them message you a list of edit suggestions that doesn't let them iterate properly. Or live pair editing with another designer. Really hoping Figma add CMYK/printing support too (would it really be that hard when they already support P3 and non-P3?).

For Sketch, it being Mac only feels very restrictive and not a good business choice for them. I personally use so few native Mac apps, a native UI isn't something that influences me and I'm not even clear on what differentiates them now. Native UIs can also be bad as well as good, I just want an app with a good UI. I often prefer a web app because it feels like it would be more sandboxed, especially for installing plugins (like Figma allows).

I have a browser extension that I sell, and I'm so glad I didn't go the native app route. It's higher friction than a web app for users to get started, but much lower friction than a native app, and it lets me easily target Linux, Window, Mac and Chromebook.

[robenkleene]

Design is a unique creative field when compared to most others, because with design you're not actually creating the final asset, it's more like you're creating a picture of the final asset that someone else needs to create.

E.g., take Blender, Adobe Premiere, Ableton Live, Photoshop, Illustrator, in all of those cases, what you export is the actual real asset (it's the movie, the drawing, the song, etc...).

It's not like that with design and it ends up pushing design apps away from native apps and towards web apps, because at some point someone, usually an engineer has to get in there and figure out all the details of how this actually needs to get built. So if the app only runs on a Mac that's annoying. But that's not an issue with say, Final Cut Pro, where the person editing the movie can just export the movie themselves, they don't need to involve someone that's maybe using a platform that Final Cut Pro doesn't run on.

[seanwilson]

Hmm, feels more related to how big the imported assets and final exports are, and how fast + accurate previews are, rather than who does the export? If I'm dealing with GB size videos and image files, local is going to have performance and storage cost advantages so that's why local makes more sense for e.g. movie editors and high-end photoshop work? A lot of terminal based development work could be done via a web app without a problem for example with the big plus of sidestepping complex local dev setup but it becomes less attractive when real-time graphics are involved.

Figma files are relatively light so previews and exports are fast - you can't even import images that are more than a few MB.

[robenkleene]

There are many types of work where large assets aren't important, e.g., illustration, 2D animation, CAD, 3D sculpting (I think? A lot of 3D work that doesn't need pre-rendered assets have really small file sizes), and as far as I know none of these have hugely popular web apps like Figma?

Also remote solutions like Jump Desktop (https://jumpdesktop.com) are pretty popular in the media editing world, so folks are choosing to edit remotely, they just aren't using web apps to do so.

So I still think the unique combination that Figma has is that unskilled folks are viewing, commenting, and editing on the document along with designers themselves, using the same tool. And that's facilitated by the tool itself being relatively simple. It's a common workflow that we see with the office suite software that I mentioned.

[seanwilson]

> There are many types of work where large assets aren't important, e.g., illustration, 2D animation, CAD, 3D sculpting (I think? A lot of 3D work that doesn't need pre-rendered assets have really small file sizes), and as far as I know none of these have hugely popular web apps like Figma?

Maybe just a matter of time? I'm not familiar with all these domains, but I'm sure there's vendor lock-in, proprietary file formats, integrations/automations, plugin ecosystems, and general popularity/momentum (plus maybe lack of full GPU and other hardware support?) for certain tools that make it hard to switch and slows down competition. It wasn't that long ago that spreadsheet and word processor software being local only was the norm either.

[robenkleene]

Most of those areas I listed already have web apps, they just aren't popular (I'd argue because there just isn't much need for them). I've written about how shockingly quickly adoption usually happens when market opportunity presents itself https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...

In this case, `asm.js`, which was the original the core technology that made any of this possible, was released in 2013, which is ancient in this day and age.

It's normally very fast from technology to creation of the initial product to wide-spread adoption (typically about five years from release of the first version, per my blog post). So more likely if this does happen, it will require another core technology breakthrough, e.g., `asm.js` (now WebAssembly) isn't enough to facilitate it on its own.

[silvestrov]

It is a real failure of Adobe management that Adobe didn't make Figma but kept doing the native old klunky apps.

The failure started with the Adobe Acrobat being such a dog slow app and never being fixed. Adobe looked too much at market share and forgot to be a tech company, so every platform now has their own PDF reader instead of using Acrobat Reader.

[whywhywhywhy]

Figma treated responsiveness and framerate as a key part of the experience, because of this approach even though it’s webtech it has much higher performance than Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, XD etc. so in a sense it embodies what native represents to people better than some literally native but poorly made software.

[DANmode]

https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

[rcarr]

100% agree. People want, above all else, convenience. Whichever tool gets the job done with the least amount of friction for the end user will generally win. People don't want to mess around learning a program, they just want to get the idea that is in their head out into reality as quick as possible. The more friction there is, the more likely the idea is to die before it's realised.

It's like the old story about Steve Jobs. He asked a bunch of engineers to make him a printing application. So they scoured the printer manuals and made this app that implemented every feature possible and took it to Jobs. He instantly dismissed it as being way too complicated, went over to the whiteboard, drew a box with a button, and said something like "You drag the file you want to print on to the box and then click the print button."

[ako]

Heard the same story, but it was about cd burning, not printing.

[rcarr]

You're correct, I misremembered it!

[jve]

> The risks of vendor lock-in, losing control of your files

As for Figma, being able to export SVG is lock in really a concern here? Many tools support .svg. So to me lock-in ain't even a concern for a tool like figma.

And you noted it well - I seem not to care if it is a web app if it works well: Figma, VSCode (Performance as a feature)

[seanwilson]

> As for Figma, being able to export SVG is lock in really a concern here? Many tools support .svg. So to me lock-in ain't even a concern for a tool like figma.

You'd lose things like shared components within and between files/libraries, interactive prototypes, shared design-tokens/variables, and responsive layout features, which is huge if your team are all-in with UI design system stuff. If you're mostly doing mockups, coding them, then copy/pasting old mockups to create new ones without using an extensive component system, SVG export is more bearable.

For UI work, it's much harder to be productive in a regular SVG editor like Inkscape though compared to something like Penpot.

[Lalabadie]

Exporting it, and exporting it fully editable are two very different expectations here.

[tbbfjotllf]

I believe it has more to do with having a great user experience than to do with whether it's a native app or a web app. Figma was convenient and way ahead of it's competitors. The thing that made it stand out was the collaborative features and the extension ecosystem. The features it didn't have were launched by highly motivated people as extensions. It made both collaboration and working fast extremely simple. Both collaboration and extensions are features that can easily be added to a native app. I love figma but I do miss the ability to be able to work offline.

[pyrale]

> The risks of vendor lock-in, losing control of your files, or price hiking sucks though, but convenience outweighs this for most. Coming from a dev background, I'd love open file formats and being able to pick where the files are stored though.

Also you don't really have proper version control, and what little you have isn't integrated with the rest of your project.

[robenkleene]

> For Sketch, it being Mac only feels very restrictive and not a good business choice for them.

Also replying to this re Sketch, especially it being a business choice for them, Sketch is a Mac app through-and-through. That entire application would never in a million years have existed were it not for being Mac only. Sketch leveraged the Mac specific APIs created by Apple in the 2000s (e.g., Core Image and Core Graphics), this is exactly why Sketch was able to innovate on the UI-side (whereas Figma pretty much took Sketch's UI innovations wholesale, as pointed out several times in this comments section), because they didn't need the technical depth that Figma had, which had to re-implement all the low-level graphics APIs themselves in order to be cross-platform (Figma is not exactly a web-only app, it runs on at least Mac native as well, I don't have a source for this but I've heard it a few times [and I don't mean the separate app download Figma makes available, which is just a web wrapper, but there's a real Mac-native internal-only version of Sketch that's used for development]).

This is why for example Sketch was able to launch a compelling product with, I think two full-time employees(?) when it initially launched, that was competitive with Adobe products. This purely a product of the Apple ecosystem and specifically the climate in the 2000s when Apple was still pushing desktop-first technologies like high-quality image and vector libraries. Note also that Sketch didn't take funding until 2019 (and only then because Figma forced their hand), whereas Figma were VC-funded from effectively day one (Field was a Thiel fellow in 2012, first funding round in 2013).

There's two patterns here that were happening during the 2000s, one is bootstrapped Mac-first applications were often quite successful. Two, applications were using the AppKit to quickly iterate on interesting UI innovations, the fuzzy finder (LaunchBar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaunchBar), the entire native-app-with-an-API-backend (Watson, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson), the extension-based editor (TextMate, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextMate), are some other examples of this.

[seanwilson]

> Sketch leveraged the Mac specific APIs created by Apple in the 2000s (e.g., Core Image and Core Graphics), this is exactly why Sketch was able to innovate on the UI-side

Hmm, can you explain more about why the Apple APIs were important for this? Isn't the screen rendering for UI design content modest compared to what cross platform 3D games at the time had to render?

[robenkleene]

Personally I think comparing media editing apps to games is a bit of a fallacy because their goals and programming practices are so different. There's an 18 part series from ProVideo Coalition that's about this subject through the lens of After Effects https://www.provideocoalition.com/after-effects-performance-...

E.g., this one https://www.provideocoalition.com/after-effects-performance-...

[christophilus]

> I notice HN comments often that say people want and appreciate native apps/UI, people don't like web apps, and people don't want files stored in the cloud. I think Figma proves these aren't things non-tech people care about when a web app is done well, similar for Google Docs.

I, for one, prefer web apps for almost everything. The less I have installed on my computer, the better. Exceptions are for really critical stuff like my text editor. Personally, if I was someone who actually used Figma, I'd prefer that to be a native app, too.

For almost everything else-- anything I only use lightly-- I want to keep that crap off of my machine.

[markdown]

> I think Figma proves these aren't things non-tech people care about

Canva (which is a tool ACTUAL non-tech people care about) proved that years ago