[steve1977]

I'm not sure if this is meant to be ironic?

"You can also create folders within the app and move photos into them, and it all happens on your filesystem."

Why, yes. But you can also do that with Finder.

And if you want to work with local data, why use the often inferior web-based widgets and toolkits instead of native ones?

This seems to be the worst of both worlds so to speak.

[coldpie]

I used to think like this too, but somewhat surprisingly to myself, I have actually come around to deciding the web API is the most user-forward API that closed-source software can target, and it is actually good for end users for closed-source software to target it. This is because web API software is distributed as plaintext to be interpreted by software under user's control, the browser. This gives a ton of power to the user. We as end users can develop browser extensions, CSS hacks, and so on, to make this closed-source software work better for us.

I frequently do this; why can't I paste into this password text box? Screw it, I go into dev tools and enable pasting into it. Who decided grey-on-grey text was a good idea? Screw it, I got into dev tools and make the text black. Why can't I copy the text on this page? Screw it, I go into dev tools and yank it straight from the DOM. Why does this stupid animation take so long? Screw it, I go develop a greasemonkey script to set the animation timer value to 0. This is all quite easy with web API software, but would be be extremely difficult with a compiled binary.

This is to say nothing about the cross-platform benefits. No one's shipping a HaikuOS binary, but most web apps work just fine there, depending on browser feature support.

I think it is also a good choice for open-source software for the same reason. It provides a common, well-tooled API for users to hack the software they are using. But open-source software has other hackable options that make it less of a strong argument there.

Native toolkits definitely have a lot of nice features that the web API doesn't (yet) have, and there's a ton of value in the consistency native toolkits provide. But I think I've come around to valuing hackability over those features, so I'm actually now a web API fan. Again, surprising myself with this switch :)

[petcat]

The best app is the one that is available on your platform.

Unfortunately I think the ubiquity of browser-based web apps are the only reason the Linux desktop is even remotely usable at this point.