Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?

Well the browser is still not good at things that say Blender or Protocols can do. Media pros still need desktop software for example audio latency in chrome is far too high to use it for any serious pro audio applications.

CAD and BIM

Place? Absolutely. Developers will to provide quality apps and customers will to pay for them? Not so much...

Browsers have one huge problem and that is they override important hotkey space (like cmd+w, cmd+f for searching etc). So native apps will always provide a better experience.

It does feel better to use a native app. Marketing as a "premium" product could work.

Lots of software would be better (from the user's POV) as a desktop app. However as a developer and as a software business owner/investor, it's (much) better to write web apps. So it depends on what you're asking here. Should you invest in desktop dev skills to further your career? No. Should you write your software idea as a desktop app if you want to make a business of it? Not if you can avoid it. If you're asking something else, well I guess the answer is 'maybe'.

I like a desktop app for uploading / syncing large files or directories to the cloud.

I'm sure there's a good web implementation out there for the Dropbox-style sync thing, I just haven't seen it yet.

The web versions of Office software still feels way less polished than the desktop version. It just doesn't feel quite right

OS extensions like command line tools, Alfred or Little Snitch will remain native by necessity.

As will applications like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. As I see it, the web platform is neither adequately performant, nor are its timing mechanisms accurate enough.

So no, native is sliding. I argue that >95% of users are happy with browsers and/or electron apps.

Either that, or those peeps move over to iPads. Which by design forces native or psuedo-native apps.

IMO: To some extent, yes.

Here are some desktop applications I enjoy and have gladly paid for:

Acorn (image editor) / 1Password / Evernote+Skitch / Pingplotter / djay

No internet? No web-app.

I suppose I am increasingly frustrated with the inability to use my computer if it has no internet....

I‘ve always been on the fence about this. I can see both sides, and don’t have a strong opinion either way. But answering is there still a place for native? I think yes for sure! I guess it comes down to if it is really important to your philosophy as a developer, or your type of app could really benefit from native capabilities.

A good example of a recent app that chose to leverage native platforms is Table Plus. They are developing native apps on Mac, Windows, and Linux. I respect the effort/skill and dedication required to pull this off! https://tableplus.com/

Every single app that I use, I try and make sure it is native. I shun electron apps at all cost. It's because people who put in effort to use the native APIs put in a lot more effort in the app in general based on my anecdotal evidence. It is also more performant and smaller in size, things that I cherish. It also pays homage to limits and striving to come up with new ways of overcoming them, which hackers would have to do in the past. I don't think not worrying about memory, CPU, etc are not healthy in the long run. Slack desktop app is almost 1 gig in size. That is crazy to me, no matter the "memory is cheap" mantra.

  $ pacman -Qi spotify
  Name            : spotify
  Version         : 1:1.1.10.546-4
  Description     : A proprietary music streaming service
  Architecture    : x86_64
  ...
  Installed Size  : 272.79 MiB

I prefer well-designed desktop applications to web applications for most things that don't naturally involve the web:

* Email clients (I use Thunderbird)

* Office suites

* Music and media players

* Maps

* Information managers (e.g., password managers)

* Development tools

* Personal productivity tools (e.g., to-do lists)

* Games

As Windows starts on-boarding their unified Electron model (I can't recall what they have named this), I suspect we'll see more lightweight Electron desktop apps. But for the record, I like purpose built, old-fashioned desktop applications. I prefer traditional desktop applications because:

* Traditional applications economize on display real-estate in ways that modern web apps rarely do. The traditional desktop application uses compact controls, very modest spacing, and high information density. While I have multiple monitors, I don't like the idea of wasting an entire monitor for one application at a time.

* Standard user interface elements. Although sadly falling out of favor, many desktop applications retain traditional proven high-productivity user interface elements such as drop-down menus, context menus, hotkeys, and other shortcuts.

* Depth of configuration. Traditional desktop apps tended to avoid the whittling of functionality and customization found in mobile and web apps. Many can be customized extensively to adapt to the tastes and needs of the user.

Bottom-line: Yes, for some users and use-cases, it still makes sense to make desktop apps. It may be a "long-tail" target at this point, but there's still a market.

    - 1/3 C/C++
    - 1/3 Javascript
    - 1/3 everything else (XML, CSS, etc) known to humanity

Not yet for music production. DAW's, software synthesisers, drum machines, latency matters here.

On Office 365 (desktop version), sometimes when you click a dropdown like the "different kinds of bullet lists" the whole application freezes for a couple of seconds while it builds the menu content or something. This didn't happen with earlier versions, if memory serves me right. I'm not sure if this is web tech or some other kind of new framework under the hood, but it makes me sad that with the speeds and cores we have on modern processors old-fashioned things like word processing have got slower than they used to be.

Native Applications in the platform's toolkit (not some cross-platform abstraction on top) will always squeeze a little bit more performance and usability out of the corners.

In some (most) cases, desktop apps could be better - performance, latency, offgrid capabilities, and even privacy. In most cases, I prefer offline desktop apps, then their online counterparts.

One area which is really tough to nail is cross-platform support though. Getting a good app on one system is hard enough, getting it in all three - rarely done. This is one of the things where web shines.

From business standpoint, I think web-first with an eye on native works for majority of cases. That is, as long as the majority of users don’t care about the above. In some future, if we start valuing efficiency and especially privacy more, this could turn around. But it feels like, even then, web will probably find a way to make more sense for most people.

You need a desktop app when 1) you’re spending a ton of time in the app or 2) you need every ounce of performance and feature set that you can obtain and 3) you’re willing to pay for it.

If you’re not building something like this, don’t build for desktop.

It's true that many apps could be replaced today with a website, specially those that are basically capturing and showing data.

But there are still many areas where native is king.

- Games

- Audio / Video work

- Adobe type of work (photo editing, motion graphics, vectors, etc)

- 3d

- Office. For me Google docs is enough, but not for heavy users.

- Desktop utilities (eg: Alfred, iStatMenus, etc). You could certainly use a web UI for those, and it would probably be fine , but you'd still need some native integration.

What a crazy mixed-up world: on desktop we ask if there's a future for native apps, while on mobile we ask if there's a future for web apps.

I mean, we built the Windows Terminal as a native application because we didn't want users to have to be saddled with 40MB of a webview/Electron just to boot up a terminal. It might take us longer to make the terminal as feature rich than it would have with JS, but no amount of engineering resources could have optimized out that web footprint. When we think about what the terminal looks like in 5 years, that's what we were thinking about.

There is a need for native apps, however that need is shrinking and, in my opinion, will continue to do so. I also happen to think that's a good thing.

The issue is that developing for a particular OS is, generally, more difficult than developing for the web. The app delivery mechanism is also more convoluted (for native apps) than simply entering a web address in the browser. The web also seems to have more ubiquitous standards that abstract away the differences between OSs - you can, with a high degree of certainty, ensure that your app is usable by 99% of computer users, given the current software they have on their device - with native apps, there is no such guarantee, especially if you're relying on shared libraries.

Browsers are also becoming more feature rich. This has had a negative impact on their memory consumption, but given it's 2020, some may retort "memory is cheap". And while some browsers (Chrome, looking especially at you) do a very poor job of memory management, I believe the competitive nature of the browser market will force a reawakening soon, where a lot of the inefficiencies in memory management will have to be eradicated (or vendors risk losing market share). Think back to 2014/15 when Node.js was really becoming established - the PHP team suddenly felt a need to re-optimise their engine for PHP7 (and with dramatic results)... Point is, only after ~20 years at the top did something spur PHP's team on enough to do something about their inefficiencies.

Finally, I can see a future where the line between web and native apps is even more blurred. WebAssembly is the first step, however things could get even more elaborate. Perhaps we could end up with the ability to start docker-like containers from within web apps (given the right permissions, of course) to spin up servers for audio/video/image processing on the client itself, and interact with them via a web page. If we get to this point, native apps would feel even more obsolete.

I know your question was only about the current state, but I felt the need to talk about the future to highlight the marked difference in the rate of innovation in the web ecosystem (fast) vs the native ecosystem (slower). It would not surprise me if the web ecosystem ends up winning in the end. If I was building an app today, and it only requires features I can deliver via the browser, I would almost certainly go the web app route.

Now, if I was building a video processing app today, I'd almost certainly go native, but in a couple of years, my answer may be very different.

Web last, please!

If computers get significantly faster then no...but at this point I always reach for a native application if I have the choice.

The only non-native app I dont detest that much is VS Code but it still feels painfully slow compared to something like Sublime Text.

Lets look at the chat apps that provide a similar functionality.

* Teams

Takes between 600-800MB on my PC. It's sluggish as hell and will often choke to re-render if I click on something.

* A native chat app Takes 15MB...Is just as eye candy as Teams and yet i dont care if it's running or not.