Almost all of Patrick's points are great if your software development goal is to make a buck. They don't seem to matter if you're writing open source, and I'd argue that desktop apps are still relevant and wonderful in the open source world. I just started a new hobby project, and am doing it as a cross-platform, non-Electron, desktop app because that's what I like to develop.
The onboarding funnel: Only a concern if you're trying to grow your user base and make sales.
Conversion: Only a concern if you're charging money.
Adwords: Only a concern if, in his words, you're trying to "trounce my competitors".
Support: If you're selling your software, you kind of have to support it. Minor concern for free and open source.
Piracy: Commercial software concern only.
Analytics and Per-user behavior: Again, only commercial software seems to feel the need to spy on users and use them as A/B testing guinea pigs.
The only point I can agree with him that makes web development better is the shorter development cycles. But I would argue that this is only a "developer convenience" and doesn't really matter to users (in fact, shorter development cycles can be worse for users as their software changes rapidly like quicksand out from under them.) To me, in my open source projects, my "development cycle" ends when I push to git, and that can be done as often as I want.
To me, I prefer desktop apps because I KNOW when I've upgraded - it either said "upgrade now?" and did it, or, in the olden days, I had to track it down, or I installed an updated version of a distro, which included updated apps, so I expected some updates.
There are some things that NATURALLY lend themselves to a website - like doctor's appointments, bank balance, etc - but it's still a pain when, on logging in to "quickly check that one thing" that I finally got the muscle memory down for because I don't do it that often, I get a "take a quick tour of our great new overhauled features" where now that one thing I wanted is buried 7 levels deep or something, or just plain unfindable.
For something like Audacity (the audio program), how the heck does it make sense to put that on a website (I'm just giving a random example, I don't think they've actually done this), where you first have to upload your source file (privacy issues), manipulate it in a graphically/widget-limited browser - do they have a powerful enough machine on the backend for your big project? - then download the result? It's WAY, WAY better to be able to run the code on your own machine, etc. AND to be stable, so that once you start a project, it won't break halfway through because they changed/removed that one feature your relied upon (no, not thinking of AI at all, why do you ask? :-)
You touched on the one thing I hate most about infrequently used websites. The inevitable popup to "explore our new features." Hell no, I don't want to do that. I haven't logged on in six months, so I'm obviously here now with a purpose in mind and I want to do that as quickly as possible and then close the tab.
Of course, I'm also an old-school hacker (typed my first BASIC program ~45 years ago), so I have a desktop mentality. None of this newfangled 17-pound-portable stuff for me :-) And phones are at best a tertiary computing mechanism: first, desktop, then laptop, then phone. So yes, I'm clearly biased. Not trying to hide that.
> For something like Audacity (the audio program), how the heck does it make sense to put that on a website (I'm just giving a random example, I don't think they've actually done this), where you first have to upload your source file (privacy issues), manipulate it in a graphically/widget-limited browser
I understand it was just an example, but you'd be surprised how far browsers have come along with technologies like Web Assembly and WebGL. Forget audio editing, you can even do video editing - without uploading any files to the remote server[1]. All the processing is done locally, within your browser.
And if you thought that was impressive, wait till you find out that you can can even boot the whole Linux kernel in your browser using a VM written in WASM[2]!
But I do agree with your points about lack of feature stability. I too prefer native apps just for the record (but for me, the main selling points are low RAM/CPU/disk requirements and keyboard friendliness).
This blog post benefits a lot from understanding where the author was at that point in their career: They had gained notoriety for their writing about their Bingo Card Creator software, but were moving on. After this they went on to build Appointment Reminder, a webapp that grew to a nice MRR before being sold off. Both were nice little indie developer success stories.
I grew up reading his writings and learned pretty quickly to read them as "this is what I'm thinking right now in my life" even though they're written more as authoritative and decisive writings from an expert. Over time he's gone from SEO expert to $30K/week consulting expert to desktop app expert to indie SaaS expert to recruiting industry expert to working for Strip Atlas. It was fun to read his writings at each point, but after so many changes I realized it was better to read it as a blog of ongoing learnings and opinions, not necessarily as retrospective wisdom shared from years of experience on the topic even if that's what the writing style conveys.
So I agree that the advice in the post should be taken entirely in context of pursuing the specific goals he was pursuing at the time. The less your goals happen to align, the less relevant the advice becomes.
Going further, if you're a hobbyist, you're probably instinctively prioritizing the aspects of the hobby that you enjoy. My first app was a shareware offering in the 1980s, written in Turbo Pascal, that was easy to package and only had to run on one platform. Because expectations were low, my app looked just as good as commercial apps.
Today, even the minimal steps of creating a desktop app have lost their appeal, but I like showing how I solved a problem, so my "apps" are Jupyter notebooks.
They're also ubiquitous for creative works, i.e. the sort of things a small set of people spend much time on, but is not something most people use. Examples:
- CAD / ECAD
- Artist/photos
- Musician software. Composing, DAW etc
- Scientific software of all domains, drug design etc
Adobe Photoshop, the most used tool for professional digital art, especially in raster graphics editing, is was first example of a perfectly fine commercial desktop application converted to cloud application with a single purpose - increased profit for Adobe.
Master Collection CS6 still works excellently, and is now (relatively) small enough to live comfortably in virtuo. Newer file formats can be handled with ffmpeg and a bit of terminal-fu.
Slicers for people doing 3D printing too (don't know if webapp slicers are more common than desktop app slicers though).
Desktop publishing.
Brokerage apps (some are webapps but many ship an actual desktop app).
And yet, to me, something changed: I still "install apps locally", but "locally" as in "only on my LAN", but they can be webapps too. I run them in containers (and the containers are in VMs).
I don't care much as to whether something is a desktop app, a GUI or a TUI, a webapp or not...
But what I do care about is being in control.
Say I'm using "I'm Mich" (immich) to view family pictures: it's shipped (it's open source), I run it locally. It'll never be "less good" than it is today: for if it is, I can simply keep running the version I have now.
It's not open to the outside world: it's to use on our LAN only.
So it's a "local" app, even if the interface is through a webapp.
In a way this entire "desktop app vs webapp" is a false dichotomy, especially when you can have a "webapp (really in a browser) that you can self-host on a LAN" and then a "desktop app that's really a webapp (say wrapped in Electron) that only works if there's an Internet connection".
I see a lot of this sentiment amongst developer friends but I never could relate. Its not that I'm against it or something but it just doesn't move me personally.
Most things I create in my free time are for my and my family's consumption and typically benefit immensely from the write once run everywhere nature of the web.
You can launch a small toy app on your intranet and run it from everywhere instantly. And typically these things are also much easier to interconnect.
I quit all social media, cancelled Spotify and whatnot and I am hella thankful for the Strawberry media player as a desktop app as it allows me to play all the music i actually own. I love desktop apps.
> Analytics and Per-user behavior: Again, only commercial software seems to feel the need to spy on users and use them as A/B testing guinea pigs.
KDE has analytics, they're just disabled by default (and I always turn them on in the hopes of convincing KDE to switch the defaults to the ones I like).
>To me, in my open source projects, my "development cycle" ends when I push to git, and that can be done as often as I want.
If development ends at a git push and users are left to build/fend for themselves (granted this is a lot of open source), then yeah not much difference, but if you're building and packaging it up for users (which you will more likely to be doing if your project is an app specifically) then the difference is massive.
Agreed, desktop frameworks have been getting really good these days, such as Flutter, Rust's GPUI (which the popular editor (and more importantly a competitor to a webview-based app in the form of Electron) Zed is written with), egui, Slint and so on, not to mention even the ability to render your desktop app to the web via WASM if you still wanted to share a link.
Times have changed quite a bit from nearly 20 years ago.
God damn that drives me up a wall! Mozilla is a terrible offender in this regard, but there are myriad others too!
The user interface is your contract with your users: don't break muscle memory! I would ditch FF-derivatives, but I'm held hostage by them because the good privacy browsers are based on FF.
Stop following fads! Be like craigslist: never change, or if you do then think long and hard about not moving things around! Also if you're a web/mobile developer, learn desktopisms! Things don't need to be spaced out like everything is a touch interface. Be dense like IRC and Briar, don't be sparse like default Discord or SimpleX! Also treat your interfaces like a language for interaction, or a sandbox with tools; don't make interfaces that only corral and guide idiots, because a non-idiot may want to use it someday.
I really wish Stallman could be technology czar, with the power to [massively] tax noncompliance to his computing philosophy.
For some things a desktop app is required (more system access) or offers some competitive UX advantage (although this reason is shrinking all the time). Short of that user's are going to choose web 95% of the time.
Counterpoint: is the web browser not already fulfilling the "universal app engine" need? It can already run on most end user devices where people do most other things. IoT/Edge devices don't count here, but this day most of their data is just being sent back to a server which is accessible via some web interface.
Ignoring the fragmentation of course; although that seems to be getting less and less each year (so long as you ignore Safari).
>Counterpoint: is the web browser not already fulfilling the "universal app engine" need?
Counter-counterpoint: Maybe it's time to require professional engineer certification before a software product can be shipped in a way that can be monetized. It's to filter devs from the industry who look at browsers today and go "Yeah, this is a good universal app engine."
Yes. But it consumes at least 10x-100x more resources to run a web app than to run a comparable desktop app (written in a sufficiently low level language).
The impact on people's time, money and on the environment are proportional.
> But it consumes at least 10x-100x more resources to run a web app than to run a comparable desktop app (written in a sufficiently low level language)
Does it? Have you compared a web app written in a sufficiently low level language with a desktop app?
Yes. I can run entire 3D games.... ten times in the memory footprint of your average browser. Even fairly decent-looking ones, not your Doom or Quake!
And if we're talking about simple GUI apps, you can run them in 10 megabytes or maybe even less. It's cheating a bit as the OS libraries are already loaded - but they're loaded anyway if you use the browser too, so it's not like you can shave off of that.
"The Browser" has turned out to be a pretty terrible application API, IMO. First, which browser? They are all (and have been) slightly different in infuriating ways going all the way back to IE6 and prior. Also, a lot of compromises were made while organically evolving what was supposed to be "a system for displaying and linking between text pages" into a cross-platform application and system API. The web's HTML/CSS roots are a heavy ball and chain for applications to carry around.
It would have been great if browsers remained lightweight html/image/hyperlink displayers, and something separate emerged as an actual cross-platform API, but history is what it is.
It didn't win. It just survived long enough. The web is a terrible platform. I haven't ever shipped a line of "web code" for money and I plan to keep it that way until I retire. What a miserable way to make a living.
Perhaps you're taking the npm/react/vercel world to be the entire web? I agree that that stuff is a scourge. But you can still just write html and Javascript and serve it from a static site, I wrote an outline in https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/web-programs.html which I frequently link to coding agents when they are going astray.
When I was a kid I was running websites with active forums and a real domain name, and I did it with vBulletin and my brain. Someone bought the domain name and website off of me, haven't touched web tech since. I did use Wt at an old job once, but the "website" was local to 1 machine and there were no security concerns.
We have failed to design a universal app engine…except for the one that dwarfs every other kind of software development for every kind of device in the world.
Do you really want a universal app engine? If you don't have a good reason for ignoring platform guidelines (as many games do), then don't. The best applications on any platform are the ones that embrace the platform's conventions and quirks.
I get why businesses will settle for mediocre, but for personal projects why would you? Pick the platform you use and make the best application you can. If you must have cross-platform support, then decouple your UI and pick the right language and libraries for each platform (SwiftUI on Mac, GTK for Linux, etc...).
Remember Flash? The big tech companies felt a threat to their walled gardens. They formed an unholy alliance to stamp out flash with a sprinkle of fake news labeling it a security threat.
Remember Livescript and early web browsers? It was almost cancelled by big tech because Java was supposed to be the cross platform system. The web and Javascript just BARELY escaped a big tech smack down. They stroked the ego of big tech by renaming to Javascript to honor Java. Licked some boots, promised a very mediocre, non threatning UI experience in the browser and big tech allowed it to exist. Then the whole world started using the web/javascript. It caught fire before big tech could extinguish. Java itself got labeled a security threat by Apple/Microsoft for threatening the walled gardens but that's another story.
You may not like browsers but they are the ONLY thing big tech can't extinguish due to ubiquity. Achieving ubiquity is not easy, not even possible for new contenders. Pray to GOD everyday and thank her for giving us the web browser as a feasible cross platform GUI.
Web browser UI available on all devices is not a failure, it's a miracle.
To top it all off, HTML/CSS/Javascript is a pretty good system. The box model of CSS is great for a cross platform design. Things need to work on a massive TV or small screen phone. The open text-based nature is great for catering to screen readers to help the visually impaired.
The latest Wizbang GPU powered UI framework probably forgot about the blind. The latest Wizbang is probably stuck in the days of absolute positioning and non-declarative layouts. And with x,y(z) coords. It may be great for the next-gen 4-D video game, but sucks for general purpose use.
As I recall, Flash and Java weren't so much security issues themselves, but rather the poorly designed gaping hole they used to enter the browser sandbox being impossible to lock down. If something like WASM existed at the time to make it possible for them to run fully inside the sandbox, I bet they'd still be around today. People really did like Macromedia/Adobe tools for web dev, and the death of Flash was only possible to overcome its popularity because of just how bad those security holes were. I miss Flash, but I really don't miss drive-by toolbar and adware installation, which went away when those holes were closed.
Flash had quite a lot of quite severe CVE; how many of those do you suppose are "fake news" connived by conspiracy (paranoid style in politics, much?) as opposed to Flash being a pile of rusted dongs as far as security goes? A lot of software from that era was a pile of rusted dongs, bloat browsers included. Flash was also the first broken website I ever came across, for some restaurant I never ended up going to. If they can't show their menu in text, oh, well.
>or offers some competitive UX advantage (although this reason is shrinking all the time).
As a user, properly implemented desktop interface will always beat web. By properly, I mean obeying shortcut keys and conventions of the desktop world. Having alt+letter assignments to boxes and functions, Tab moves between elements, pressing PageUp/PageDown while in a text entry area for a chat window scrolls the chat history above and not the text entry area (looking at you SimpleX), etc.
Sorry, not sorry. Web interface is interface-smell, and I avoid it as much as possible. Give me a TUI before a webpage.
Both can be true: we can have different preferences about what we're doing to put food on the table and what we're doing when we build something on our own for other reasons.
I have spent a good deal of my life writing software to put food on the table. I didn't interpret any of what he wrote in the way you describe. Perhaps you could explain why you did.
Attitudes like these is why non-developers don't want to use open source software.
These concerns may not matter to you, the developer, but they absolutely matter to end-users.
If your prospective user can't find the setup.exe they just downloaded, they won't be able to use your software. If your conversion and onboarding sucks, they'll get confused and try the commercial offering instead. If you don't gather analytics and A/B test, you won't even know this is happening. If you're not the first result on Google, they'll try the commercial app first.
Users want apps that work consistently on all their devices and look the same on both desktop and mobile, keep their data when they spill coffee on the laptop, and let them share content on Slack with people who don't have the app installed. Open source doesn't have good answers to these problems, so let's not shoot ourselves in the foot even further.
This presupposes that the OSS creator even wants users in the first place, which might not always be the case as it could be personal software; and that these users actually want these features, as many do not want analytics, ads, and A/B tests in your app.
I guess in the same way that one might presuppose a boat wants water?
If a piece of software doesn’t have users and the developers don’t care about the papercuts they are delivering, I would argue what they have created is more of an art project than a utility.
Science research without obvious practical application can still be important and valuable.
Art works without popular appeal can become highly treasured by some.
Open source software doesn't have to be ambitious to be worthwhile and useful. It can be artful, utilitarian or a artifact of play. Commercial standards shouldn't be the only measure of good software.
It's more like building your own boat then someone else coming along and saying it'll never compete with a cruise ship because it doesn't have a water slide and endless buffet; sometimes, things in the same category can serve wholly different purposes.
I'm a seasoned developer and I frequently come across OSS projects where I spend half an hour or more in "how the fuck do I actually use this"-land. A lot of developers need to take the mindset of writing the documentation for their non-tech grandma from the ground up.
Not off to a great start... The "look how many steps it takes to convert shareware users" is insanely overblown.
1-4. Google, find, read... this is the same for web apps.
2. Click download and wait a few seconds. Not enough time to give up because native apps are small. Heavy JS web apps might load for longer than that.
3. Click on the executable that the browser pops up in front of you. No closing the browser or looking for your downloads folder. It's right there!
3.5. You probably don't need an installer and it definitely doesn't need a multi-step wizard. Maybe a big "install" button with a smaller "advanced options".
3.6. Your installer (if you even have it) autostarts the program after finishing
4. The user uses it and is happy.
5. Some time later, the program prompts the user to pay, potentially taking them directly onto the payment form either in-app or by opening it in a browser.
6. They enter their details and pay.
That's one step more than a web app, but also a much bigger chance the user will come back to pay (you can literally send them a popup, you're a native app!).
seriously desktop apps kinda own i just desktop-app'd a pwa made it do SSO auth at my org and now its just part of the self-serve application download kiosk and we're laughing at all the pain we've endured for so many years writing up proposals and billing to scale up web app infra for internal tooling and stuff.
im kinda enjoying coming back to earth right now with my team and we're just hmmmmmmm'ing a lot of things like this. we've had devops chasing 23498234892% availability with k8s and load balancers and all this stuff and we're now assessing how much of that cruft was completely unnecessary and made everything some amorphous blob of complexity and unpredictable billing & and really gave devops a moat to just say "no" to so many things that came through the pipeline. there's so many things that can just be dragged back to like an actual on premise machine and served up through the internal network. we are... amused at how self-important we made ourselves out to be this past decade.
we're probably like days worth of goofing away from going to buy a few mac minis and plug it into some uninterruptable power supplies and just seeing how un-serious we can get with so much tooling we've built over the years. and for everything else, desktop apps. seriously desktop apps is like free infrastructure if you build it right.
This reminds me of a past job working for an e-commerce company. This wasn’t a store like Amazon that “everyone” uses weekly, it was a specific pricey fashion brand. They had put out a shitty iOS app, which was just a very bare-bones wrapper around the website. But they raved about how much better the conversion rate rates were there. Nobody would listen to me about how the customers that bother downloading a specific app for shopping at a particular retailer are obviously just superfans so of course that self-selected group converts well.
So many people who should be smart based on their job titles and salaries, got the causation completely backwards!
Hey, I notice this kind of thing all the time. People use "data" to tell the story they want to -- similar to how it seems humans make a decision subconsciously then weave a rational decision to back it up afterwards.
Do you have principles on how to tackle this? I feel stuck between the irrationality of anecdata and the irrationality of lying with numbers. As if the only useful statistic is one I collect and calculate myself. And, even then, I could be lying to myself.
In 2026, the number of mobile applications in the App Store and Google Play increased by 60% year over year, largely because entry into the market has become much easier thanks to AI.
Having my credit card already is an overwhelming advantage for the Apple App store and for Steam. I won’t say it is impossible to overcome, but I think I could count on my fingers the number of instances where I, like, typed my card into a website to buy anything, in the last decade.
Yes, but they are mostly paying little or nothing. How much did you spend on phone apps this year? And ads pay a pittance, unless you have massive scale.
> However, the existence of pirates is a stitch in my craw, particularly when any schoolmarm typing the name of my software into Google is prompted to try stealing it instead:
I wonder whether Google, in its Don't Be Evil era, ever considered what they should do about software piracy, and what they decided.
I'd guess they would've decided to either discourage piracy, or at least not encourage it.
In the screenshot, the Google search query doesn't say anything about wanting to pirate, yet Google is suggesting piracy, a la entrapment.
(Though other history about that user may suggest a software piracy tendency, but still, Google knows what piracy seeking looks like, and they special-case all sorts of other topics.)
Is the ethics practice to wait to be sued or told by a regulator to stop doing something?
Or maybe they anticipate costs and competition for how they operate, and lobby for the regulation they want, so all they have to do is be compliant with it, and be let off the hook for lawsuits?
"Piracy" today is not stealing IP. It's not even what it used to mean, when it was originally used to describe rogue publishers who violated copyright. IP laws as used today against private downloaders and users are the legalization of plundering of people who do the equivalent of hear a fact/idea and act on it or use it. IP cannot be stolen, an "immunity from plundering" fee is what's being paid (license). The whole justification for it with software, namely copying from disc/internet to local storage, and then copying from local storage into RAM, is a legal formality to facilitate this plundering.
It is plundering those who didn't pay you for legal immunity.
The original expression came out of an internal company discussion that someone summarized (paraphrased) as "when there's a tough choice to make, one is usually less evil. Make that choice."
In the early days of Google in the public consciousness, this turned into "you can make money without being evil." (From the 2004 S-1.)
Over time, it got shortened to "don't be evil." But this phrase became an obligatory catchphrase for anyone's gripes against Google The Megacorp. Hey, Google, how come there's no dark mode on this page? Whatever happened to "don't be evil"? It didn't serve its purpose anymore, so it was dropped.
Answering your question really depends on your priors. I could see someone honestly believing Google was never in that era, or that it has always been from the start. I strongly believe that the original (and today admittedly stale) sentiment has never changed.
Making a loud affair out its retirement rather than quietly letting it collect dust and be forgotten over time was most definitely not a good idea.
The public already demonstrated that they adopted, misused and weaponized the maxim. Its retirement just sharpened the edge of that weapon. Now instead of "What happened to don't be evil?" it's become "Of course Google is being evil." and everything exists in that lens.
A similar dynamic is playing out with Anthropic, whose founders left OpenAI in part over a philosophical split that could be described, if you'll grant a little literary license appropriate to this thread, as Anthropic choosing the "don't be evil" path. No surprise that we now see HN commentary skewering Anthropic for not living up to it.
They had to at least nominally have it, early on, to be able to hire the best Internet-savvy people.
Tech industry culture today is pretty much finance bro culture, plus a couple decades of domain-specific conditioning for abuse.
But at the time Google started, even the newly-arrived gold rush people didn't think like that.
And the more experienced people often had been brought up in altruistic Internet culture: they wanted to bring the goodness to everyone, and were aware of some abuse threats by extrapolating from non-Internet society.
Early in Google's history, I took that sentiment as saying that they were one of us (Internet people), and weren't going to act like Microsoft (at the time, regarded by Internet people as an underhanded and ignorant company). Even though Google had a very nice IR function and general cluefulness, and seemed destined to be big and powerful.
And if it were the altruistic Internet people they hired, the slogan/mantra could be seen as a reminder to check your ego/ambition/enthusiasm, as well as a shorthand for communicating when you were doing that, and that would be respected by everyone because it had been blessed from the top as a Prime Directive.
Today, if a tech company says they aspire not to be evil: (1) they almost certainly don't mean it, in the current culture and investment environment, or they wouldn't have gotten money from VCs (who invest in people motivated like themselves); (2) most of their hires won't believe it, except perhaps new grads who probably haven't thought much about it; and (3) nobody will follow through on it (e.g., witness how almost all OpenAI employees literally signed to enable the big-money finance-bro coup of supposedly a public interest non-profit).
I took it to mean, prioritize long-term growth over short-term income. But the slogan was silly even back then, like obviously an evil company would claim to not be evil.
FWIW, it absolutely was believable to me at the time that another Internet person would do a company consistent with what I saw as the dominant (pre-gold-rush) Internet culture.
For example of a personality familiar to more people on HN, one might have trusted that Aaron Swartz was being genuine, if he said he wanted to do a company that wouldn't be evil.
(I had actually proposed a similar corporate rule to a prospective co-founder, at a time when Google might've still been hosted at Stanford. Though the co-founder was new to Internet, and didn't have the same thinking.)
Web apps weren't so easy to make back then, so standalone apps were the norm. Shortly before 2009 a lot of the web apps were Java or Adobe Flash, and 2009 was part of the transition period where platforms were at war with that stuff but open-web alternatives weren't mature yet.
Yeah I know I was there -- also today's wasteful "open-web alternatives" wouldn't fly anyway, because I recall even during the XP era having min-specs of, like, 800mhz/512mb
No, "grass always looks greener on the other side" is a perspective thing. If you stand on your own grass then you look down onto it and see the dirt, but if you look over to the other side you see the gras from the side which makes it look more dense and hides the dirt. But it's the same boring grass everywhere. :)
At first, I thought "this is missing the point of the phrase" and moved on, but now I'm back to say it's stuck in my head and an intuitive, pretty neat way to think about it.
Never depend on anything you can't later privateer when the publisher decides to retroactively change the deal (or worse: when they become a subscription "service"). Minimize regular payment sinks. Owning your own infrastructure will always be cheaper in the long run; when you rent, you're paying the cost of ownership plus maintenance plus profit. Sure there may be an economy of scale, but what are you trading for that scale (loss of privacy, loss of sovereignty, loss of ownership, loss of control)?
Nothing in this article is wrong, but worth noting that pre-AI, the companies that most significantly transformed the way we use our computers (Slack, Spotify, VS Code, etc.) did ship desktop apps.
“Desktop Apps”? I’d say pre-Electron, the ones that existed that far back shipped desktop apps, but for the past 10-15 years it’s all been Electron slop, which hardly qualify as “desktop apps” in my book.
If anything, it’s my very faint hope that AI would give companies - especially non-software companies - the bandwidth to release two real native apps instead of just 2 builds of a shitty Electron app. Fat chance though, I think, not least because companies love to use their “bRaNdInG” on everything - so the native look and feel a real app gives you “for free” is a downside for the clowns that do the visual design for most companies.
For what it’s worth, I tried making a GTK4 app. I got started, created a window, created a header bar, then went to add a url/path entry widget and everything fell apart.
Entry suggestions/completions are formally deprecated with no replacement since 2022. When I did get them working on the deprecated API there was an empty completion option that would segfault if clicked. The default behaviour didn’t hide completions on window unfocus, so my completions would hover over any other open window. There was seemingly no way to disambiguate tab vs enter events… it just sucked.
So after adding one widget I abandoned the project. It felt like the early releases of SwiftUI where you could add a list view but then would run into weird issues as soon as you tried adding stuff to it.
Similarly trying to build an app for macOS practically depends on Swift by Sundell Hacking with Swift or others to make up for Apple’s lack of documentation in many areas. For years stuff like NSColor vs Color and similar API boundaries added friction, and the native macOS SwiftUI components just never felt normal while I tried making apps.
As heavy as web libraries and electron are, at least work mostly out of the box.
I've used Qt off and on, and it's generally worked as advertised. Although when drawing very short lines on a canvas way back when (~2004), it wouldn't do a great job and I had to hack in custom routines that did a much better job.
For prototyping / one-offs, I've always enjoyed working in Tcl/Itcl and Tk/Itk - object oriented Tcl with a decent set of widgets. It's not going to set the world on fire, but it's pretty portable (should mostly work on every platform with minor changes), has a way to package up standalone executables, can ship many-files-as-one with an internal filesystem, etc..
Of course, I spent ~15 years in EDA, so it's much more comfortable than for most people, but it can easily be integrated into C/C++ as well with SWIG, etc.
>Although when drawing very short lines on a canvas way back when (~2004), it wouldn't do a great job and I had to hack in custom routines that did a much better job.
QCanvas (or was it QGraphicsCanvas?) has long since been replace with QGraphicsScene, which is much more capable and doesn't suffer from pixelation issues.
Probably. We paid thousands / year for the developer seat in our startup, and in the end, it wasn't great. I did manage to make the Tcl/Tk event loop and the Qt event loop work together, so we could have Tk windows inside a Qt app!
> I've always enjoyed working in Tcl/Itcl and Tk/Itk
In the near future I need to lash up a windows utility to generate a bunch of PDF files from a CSV (in concert with GhostScript), with specific filenames. I was trying to figure out the best approach and hadn't even considered Tcl and Tk - with Itcl you might have just given me a new rabbithole to explore! Thanks! (...I think!)
I hope it works out! It's amazing how far Tcl/Tk has come since I "had" to use it as a wrapper around an X11 window back on an SGI Irix, using Tcl scripting to interface to an OpenGL backend. I think that was like 7.3.x or something in 1994. And it was pretty cool back then already! The team around Tcl is small, but dedicated and brilliant, IMHO.
> If anything, it’s my very faint hope that AI would give companies - especially non-software companies - the bandwidth to release two real native apps instead of just 2 builds of a shitty Electron app.
Anthropic has the resources of a fully armed and operational Claude Mythos (eyeroll), but they still choose to shit out an electron app on all of their users instead of going native like their competitors have done.
All of those examples are web apps, two of them started on the web itself, and none of them transformed anything about how we used our computers (slack replaced a number of competitors, spotify is iTunes for the web, and VS code is a smaller jetbrains)
Flutter has brought the joy of desktop gui programming back for me. Especially in this vibe coding era, building all those apps that only really have value to me has never been easier. And seeing the support for Flutter from Canonical has been nice. They’ve been helping make flutter on Linux better
Realizing I could frickin mine enough bitcoins overnight back then to probably be set for life (maybe for multiple generations) now, is one of my biggest life regrets. I assume it’s shared with all other people who were into tech back then but dismissed bitcoin as stupid, as I did.
You simply can't get hung up on what could have been. Same applies to trying to time the stock market... should have bought, should have sold. Best thing is to know there's nothing that can be done about the past and move along and deal with what you can do now instead.
You're right. What gets me though is that unlike the stock market, bitcoin was an incredibly rare occurrence where anyone could have gotten extraordinarily rich without even incurring any risk! (besides a couple evenings spent learning how to use it.) Whereas to have $10MM today in GOOG stock, I would have had to invest over $300k in 2010.
That's not true at all, any number of things could have killed bitcoin in its infancy. The stakes were just low. Somewhere out there is a lost collection of wallets of mine, collectively holding ~100btc ($1000 at the time). If regulators cracked down hard, that 100btc would have become just as worthless and either way I'd be out $1000.
"Risk" is an epistemic claim about the future taking the worse path. Obviously looking back it looks like risk-free money. That's not how it looked at the time. The "currency of the future" thing was always niche, especially after the crash in 2013, until a much larger cultural shift happened around 2015-ish.
Plenty of people will chime in with early bitcoin stories, and how they always believed it was going to go to the moon, etc. I always find it curious because my memory of the time period is that it was a means to an end, and that's how the overwhelming majority saw it and treated it. Funnily enough, it was thanks to that overwhelming majority that led to it being worth anything at all. If it was just a bunch of yahoos clamoring about the "currency of the future" thing, it probably would have gone absolutely fucking nowhere. The irony that the yahoos ended up becoming the majority I think is underappreciated.
Every year since around 2014, friends and family would ask whether they should buy Bitcoin, and every year I told them that I had looked into Bitcoin, I fully understood what Bitcoin was and how it worked, and I recommended that they not invest in Bitcoin because it was stupid. And every year, my advice has been disastrously wrong. Who knows, maybe 2026 will be the first time I'm right.
I’m actually hopping on the desktop applications train. Though not for money. I just think the browser is becoming a surveillance plague of computing and we need MORE high quality desktop software not built on the invasive web stack to counter it.
I have lot and hate relationship with windows native desktop application. As a kid, I use to look for something GUI application and .exe application since they are breeze to run and just felt right.
Now in my day job, I just dislike developing for windows desktop application - partly probably the application is massive and super slow to develop or just there isn't a lot of investment from the company stand point into the product.
On the other hand I spent 25 years selling desktop software and never once had an annual review. I never had to submit an application for time off. I never had to ask permission for a dentist appointment. If the weather was good I could take the day off and go for a bike ride. I didn’t attend any scrum meetings nor did I have to argue about what framework to use with a PM who couldn’t code FizzBuzz.
First up, this article is 17 years old. There's no reason to assume the author has exactly the same opinions today.
More importantly, the author is talking about the realities of trying to earn a decent living shipping independent software. That requires paying customers.
It's perfectly reasonable to want to be paid for your work, and it certainly doesn't warrant the vitriol in your comment.
Please tell me at least you don't work some software corp where it's someone else's job to worry about the business, if you're going to pass that kind of judgement.
The author (who is a frequent commenter here) started a company called Appointment Reminder after writing this, which for years was my favorite example of an independent small company that identified a niche, served it well, and then went on to be acquired.
The world has changed a lot since then. The days where 37 Signals could build an empire out of simple web form apps and individuals could build and sell a SaaS that sends reminder texts are long gone. Most of the low hanging fruit was mined out long ago and most simple services have seen 100 different startups try to serve them already.
As much as Appointment Reminder was my prime example of a successful indie SaaS, the author's second startup has (with all due respect) become one of my prime examples of not validating product-market fit before building your product. They went on to build Starfighter, a company that was supposed to be a candidate vetting platform where people could do complex coding challenges and then get matched up with companies wanting to hire people. It was built partially in the open through their newsletter and in Hacker News posts.
If you thought doing LeetCode problems to get interviews was annoying, imagine having to spend hours or days going through a CTF where you hack multi-core CPUs to do something complex with a simulated stock market. I can't even remember the entire premise, but every time I read something about the company it was getting more and more complex. At the same time I was on other forums where candidates were going the opposite direction: becoming frustrated with the proliferation of coding interviews and refusing to do interview challenges that would take hours of their time.
I remember through the entire process thinking that it seemed like a questionable business plan that wouldn't really appeal to companies or to candidates. Even the Hacker News comments were full of (surprisingly polite) feedback saying that investing a lot of hours into solving programming puzzles to maybe get some recruiter interest wasn't appealing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10480390
Some amazing foreshadowing in that thread from one of the co-founders (not Patrick McKenzie):
> I literally lack the ability to form coherent sentences about our business that don't somehow involve how to render a graph of AVR basic blocks in a React web app, is how little we're thinking about how the game interacts with recruiting right now.
> We are going to get the CTF right, and then work from there to a sustainable recruiting business. We should have done it the other way around, but we didn't. :)
As you might have guessed, it didn't work out at all. It was weird for me to follow one of my indie startup heroes on their journey into their second business that skipped all of the normal startup advice and then reached the exact conclusion that advice was warning against.
It was enlightening to follow along and I'm glad they tried something different and shared it along the way, but watching it happen was a turning point for me in how I approach advice from any one individual author, blogger, writer, or influencer.
"Over roughly the same period my day job has changed and transitioned me from writing thick clients in Swing to big freaking enterprise web apps."
I mean, the web kind of won. We just don't have a simple and useful way to
design for the web AND the desktop at the same time. I also use the www of
course, with a gazillion of useful CSS and JavaScript where I have to. I
have not entirely given up on the desktop world, but I abandoned ruby-gtk
and switched to ... jruby-swing. I know, I know, nobody uses swing anymore.
The point is not so much about using swing per se, but simply to have a GUI
that is functional on windows, with the same code base (I ultimately use the
same code base for everything on the backend anyway). I guess I would fully
transition into the world wide web too, but how can you access files on the
filesystem, create directories etc... without using node? JavaScript is deliberately restricted, node is pretty awful, ruby-wasm has no real documentation.
Almost all of Patrick's points are great if your software development goal is to make a buck. They don't seem to matter if you're writing open source, and I'd argue that desktop apps are still relevant and wonderful in the open source world. I just started a new hobby project, and am doing it as a cross-platform, non-Electron, desktop app because that's what I like to develop.
The onboarding funnel: Only a concern if you're trying to grow your user base and make sales.
Conversion: Only a concern if you're charging money.
Adwords: Only a concern if, in his words, you're trying to "trounce my competitors".
Support: If you're selling your software, you kind of have to support it. Minor concern for free and open source.
Piracy: Commercial software concern only.
Analytics and Per-user behavior: Again, only commercial software seems to feel the need to spy on users and use them as A/B testing guinea pigs.
The only point I can agree with him that makes web development better is the shorter development cycles. But I would argue that this is only a "developer convenience" and doesn't really matter to users (in fact, shorter development cycles can be worse for users as their software changes rapidly like quicksand out from under them.) To me, in my open source projects, my "development cycle" ends when I push to git, and that can be done as often as I want.
To me, I prefer desktop apps because I KNOW when I've upgraded - it either said "upgrade now?" and did it, or, in the olden days, I had to track it down, or I installed an updated version of a distro, which included updated apps, so I expected some updates.
There are some things that NATURALLY lend themselves to a website - like doctor's appointments, bank balance, etc - but it's still a pain when, on logging in to "quickly check that one thing" that I finally got the muscle memory down for because I don't do it that often, I get a "take a quick tour of our great new overhauled features" where now that one thing I wanted is buried 7 levels deep or something, or just plain unfindable.
For something like Audacity (the audio program), how the heck does it make sense to put that on a website (I'm just giving a random example, I don't think they've actually done this), where you first have to upload your source file (privacy issues), manipulate it in a graphically/widget-limited browser - do they have a powerful enough machine on the backend for your big project? - then download the result? It's WAY, WAY better to be able to run the code on your own machine, etc. AND to be stable, so that once you start a project, it won't break halfway through because they changed/removed that one feature your relied upon (no, not thinking of AI at all, why do you ask? :-)
You touched on the one thing I hate most about infrequently used websites. The inevitable popup to "explore our new features." Hell no, I don't want to do that. I haven't logged on in six months, so I'm obviously here now with a purpose in mind and I want to do that as quickly as possible and then close the tab.
Of course, I'm also an old-school hacker (typed my first BASIC program ~45 years ago), so I have a desktop mentality. None of this newfangled 17-pound-portable stuff for me :-) And phones are at best a tertiary computing mechanism: first, desktop, then laptop, then phone. So yes, I'm clearly biased. Not trying to hide that.
> For something like Audacity (the audio program), how the heck does it make sense to put that on a website (I'm just giving a random example, I don't think they've actually done this), where you first have to upload your source file (privacy issues), manipulate it in a graphically/widget-limited browser
I understand it was just an example, but you'd be surprised how far browsers have come along with technologies like Web Assembly and WebGL. Forget audio editing, you can even do video editing - without uploading any files to the remote server[1]. All the processing is done locally, within your browser.
And if you thought that was impressive, wait till you find out that you can can even boot the whole Linux kernel in your browser using a VM written in WASM[2]!
But I do agree with your points about lack of feature stability. I too prefer native apps just for the record (but for me, the main selling points are low RAM/CPU/disk requirements and keyboard friendliness).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47847558
[2] https://joelseverin.github.io/linux-wasm/
This blog post benefits a lot from understanding where the author was at that point in their career: They had gained notoriety for their writing about their Bingo Card Creator software, but were moving on. After this they went on to build Appointment Reminder, a webapp that grew to a nice MRR before being sold off. Both were nice little indie developer success stories.
I grew up reading his writings and learned pretty quickly to read them as "this is what I'm thinking right now in my life" even though they're written more as authoritative and decisive writings from an expert. Over time he's gone from SEO expert to $30K/week consulting expert to desktop app expert to indie SaaS expert to recruiting industry expert to working for Strip Atlas. It was fun to read his writings at each point, but after so many changes I realized it was better to read it as a blog of ongoing learnings and opinions, not necessarily as retrospective wisdom shared from years of experience on the topic even if that's what the writing style conveys.
So I agree that the advice in the post should be taken entirely in context of pursuing the specific goals he was pursuing at the time. The less your goals happen to align, the less relevant the advice becomes.
Going further, if you're a hobbyist, you're probably instinctively prioritizing the aspects of the hobby that you enjoy. My first app was a shareware offering in the 1980s, written in Turbo Pascal, that was easy to package and only had to run on one platform. Because expectations were low, my app looked just as good as commercial apps.
Today, even the minimal steps of creating a desktop app have lost their appeal, but I like showing how I solved a problem, so my "apps" are Jupyter notebooks.
My coworker showed a Jupyter notebook with ipywidgets and it looked just like an app. A good CLI using FastAPI's `typer` looks a lot like an app too.
They're also ubiquitous for creative works, i.e. the sort of things a small set of people spend much time on, but is not something most people use. Examples:
Adobe Photoshop, the most used tool for professional digital art, especially in raster graphics editing, is was first example of a perfectly fine commercial desktop application converted to cloud application with a single purpose - increased profit for Adobe.
Master Collection CS6 still works excellently, and is now (relatively) small enough to live comfortably in virtuo. Newer file formats can be handled with ffmpeg and a bit of terminal-fu.
Slicers for people doing 3D printing too (don't know if webapp slicers are more common than desktop app slicers though).
Desktop publishing.
Brokerage apps (some are webapps but many ship an actual desktop app).
And yet, to me, something changed: I still "install apps locally", but "locally" as in "only on my LAN", but they can be webapps too. I run them in containers (and the containers are in VMs).
I don't care much as to whether something is a desktop app, a GUI or a TUI, a webapp or not...
But what I do care about is being in control.
Say I'm using "I'm Mich" (immich) to view family pictures: it's shipped (it's open source), I run it locally. It'll never be "less good" than it is today: for if it is, I can simply keep running the version I have now.
It's not open to the outside world: it's to use on our LAN only.
So it's a "local" app, even if the interface is through a webapp.
In a way this entire "desktop app vs webapp" is a false dichotomy, especially when you can have a "webapp (really in a browser) that you can self-host on a LAN" and then a "desktop app that's really a webapp (say wrapped in Electron) that only works if there's an Internet connection".
I see a lot of this sentiment amongst developer friends but I never could relate. Its not that I'm against it or something but it just doesn't move me personally.
Most things I create in my free time are for my and my family's consumption and typically benefit immensely from the write once run everywhere nature of the web.
You can launch a small toy app on your intranet and run it from everywhere instantly. And typically these things are also much easier to interconnect.
I quit all social media, cancelled Spotify and whatnot and I am hella thankful for the Strawberry media player as a desktop app as it allows me to play all the music i actually own. I love desktop apps.
> Analytics and Per-user behavior: Again, only commercial software seems to feel the need to spy on users and use them as A/B testing guinea pigs.
KDE has analytics, they're just disabled by default (and I always turn them on in the hopes of convincing KDE to switch the defaults to the ones I like).
>To me, in my open source projects, my "development cycle" ends when I push to git, and that can be done as often as I want.
If development ends at a git push and users are left to build/fend for themselves (granted this is a lot of open source), then yeah not much difference, but if you're building and packaging it up for users (which you will more likely to be doing if your project is an app specifically) then the difference is massive.
Agreed, desktop frameworks have been getting really good these days, such as Flutter, Rust's GPUI (which the popular editor (and more importantly a competitor to a webview-based app in the form of Electron) Zed is written with), egui, Slint and so on, not to mention even the ability to render your desktop app to the web via WASM if you still wanted to share a link.
Times have changed quite a bit from nearly 20 years ago.
I generally despise "web tech" as it is today. Browsers are not application platforms!
Agreed.
And his point about randomly moving buttons to see if people like it better?
No fucking thanks. The last thing I need is an app made of quicksand.
God damn that drives me up a wall! Mozilla is a terrible offender in this regard, but there are myriad others too!
The user interface is your contract with your users: don't break muscle memory! I would ditch FF-derivatives, but I'm held hostage by them because the good privacy browsers are based on FF.
Stop following fads! Be like craigslist: never change, or if you do then think long and hard about not moving things around! Also if you're a web/mobile developer, learn desktopisms! Things don't need to be spaced out like everything is a touch interface. Be dense like IRC and Briar, don't be sparse like default Discord or SimpleX! Also treat your interfaces like a language for interaction, or a sandbox with tools; don't make interfaces that only corral and guide idiots, because a non-idiot may want to use it someday.
I really wish Stallman could be technology czar, with the power to [massively] tax noncompliance to his computing philosophy.
its just waaaaaay easier to distribute a web app
For some things a desktop app is required (more system access) or offers some competitive UX advantage (although this reason is shrinking all the time). Short of that user's are going to choose web 95% of the time.
This points to our failure as an industry to design a universal app engine that isn't a browser.
Counterpoint: is the web browser not already fulfilling the "universal app engine" need? It can already run on most end user devices where people do most other things. IoT/Edge devices don't count here, but this day most of their data is just being sent back to a server which is accessible via some web interface.
Ignoring the fragmentation of course; although that seems to be getting less and less each year (so long as you ignore Safari).
>Counterpoint: is the web browser not already fulfilling the "universal app engine" need?
Counter-counterpoint: Maybe it's time to require professional engineer certification before a software product can be shipped in a way that can be monetized. It's to filter devs from the industry who look at browsers today and go "Yeah, this is a good universal app engine."
Yes. But it consumes at least 10x-100x more resources to run a web app than to run a comparable desktop app (written in a sufficiently low level language).
The impact on people's time, money and on the environment are proportional.
> But it consumes at least 10x-100x more resources to run a web app than to run a comparable desktop app (written in a sufficiently low level language)
Does it? Have you compared a web app written in a sufficiently low level language with a desktop app?
Yes. I can run entire 3D games.... ten times in the memory footprint of your average browser. Even fairly decent-looking ones, not your Doom or Quake!
And if we're talking about simple GUI apps, you can run them in 10 megabytes or maybe even less. It's cheating a bit as the OS libraries are already loaded - but they're loaded anyway if you use the browser too, so it's not like you can shave off of that.
No. We did, it is the browser.
"The Browser" has turned out to be a pretty terrible application API, IMO. First, which browser? They are all (and have been) slightly different in infuriating ways going all the way back to IE6 and prior. Also, a lot of compromises were made while organically evolving what was supposed to be "a system for displaying and linking between text pages" into a cross-platform application and system API. The web's HTML/CSS roots are a heavy ball and chain for applications to carry around.
It would have been great if browsers remained lightweight html/image/hyperlink displayers, and something separate emerged as an actual cross-platform API, but history is what it is.
They're not that different, and it's a pretty good platform and pretty easy to program for. That's why it won.
It didn't win. It just survived long enough. The web is a terrible platform. I haven't ever shipped a line of "web code" for money and I plan to keep it that way until I retire. What a miserable way to make a living.
Perhaps you're taking the npm/react/vercel world to be the entire web? I agree that that stuff is a scourge. But you can still just write html and Javascript and serve it from a static site, I wrote an outline in https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/web-programs.html which I frequently link to coding agents when they are going astray.
When I was a kid I was running websites with active forums and a real domain name, and I did it with vBulletin and my brain. Someone bought the domain name and website off of me, haven't touched web tech since. I did use Wt at an old job once, but the "website" was local to 1 machine and there were no security concerns.
We have failed to design a universal app engine…except for the one that dwarfs every other kind of software development for every kind of device in the world.
Can a single webpage address & use more than 4gb of ram nowadays? I was filling 16gb of ram with a single Ableton live session in 2011.
How about a webpage shouldn't ever address & use even 4GB of RAM! :O
> design a universal app engine
You've reminded me of the XKCD comic about standards: https://xkcd.com/927/
Do you really want a universal app engine? If you don't have a good reason for ignoring platform guidelines (as many games do), then don't. The best applications on any platform are the ones that embrace the platform's conventions and quirks.
I get why businesses will settle for mediocre, but for personal projects why would you? Pick the platform you use and make the best application you can. If you must have cross-platform support, then decouple your UI and pick the right language and libraries for each platform (SwiftUI on Mac, GTK for Linux, etc...).
Please, for the love of all that is holy, not GTK.
Remember Flash? The big tech companies felt a threat to their walled gardens. They formed an unholy alliance to stamp out flash with a sprinkle of fake news labeling it a security threat.
Remember Livescript and early web browsers? It was almost cancelled by big tech because Java was supposed to be the cross platform system. The web and Javascript just BARELY escaped a big tech smack down. They stroked the ego of big tech by renaming to Javascript to honor Java. Licked some boots, promised a very mediocre, non threatning UI experience in the browser and big tech allowed it to exist. Then the whole world started using the web/javascript. It caught fire before big tech could extinguish. Java itself got labeled a security threat by Apple/Microsoft for threatening the walled gardens but that's another story.
You may not like browsers but they are the ONLY thing big tech can't extinguish due to ubiquity. Achieving ubiquity is not easy, not even possible for new contenders. Pray to GOD everyday and thank her for giving us the web browser as a feasible cross platform GUI.
Web browser UI available on all devices is not a failure, it's a miracle.
To top it all off, HTML/CSS/Javascript is a pretty good system. The box model of CSS is great for a cross platform design. Things need to work on a massive TV or small screen phone. The open text-based nature is great for catering to screen readers to help the visually impaired.
The latest Wizbang GPU powered UI framework probably forgot about the blind. The latest Wizbang is probably stuck in the days of absolute positioning and non-declarative layouts. And with x,y(z) coords. It may be great for the next-gen 4-D video game, but sucks for general purpose use.
As I recall, Flash and Java weren't so much security issues themselves, but rather the poorly designed gaping hole they used to enter the browser sandbox being impossible to lock down. If something like WASM existed at the time to make it possible for them to run fully inside the sandbox, I bet they'd still be around today. People really did like Macromedia/Adobe tools for web dev, and the death of Flash was only possible to overcome its popularity because of just how bad those security holes were. I miss Flash, but I really don't miss drive-by toolbar and adware installation, which went away when those holes were closed.
Flash had quite a lot of quite severe CVE; how many of those do you suppose are "fake news" connived by conspiracy (paranoid style in politics, much?) as opposed to Flash being a pile of rusted dongs as far as security goes? A lot of software from that era was a pile of rusted dongs, bloat browsers included. Flash was also the first broken website I ever came across, for some restaurant I never ended up going to. If they can't show their menu in text, oh, well.
>or offers some competitive UX advantage (although this reason is shrinking all the time).
As a user, properly implemented desktop interface will always beat web. By properly, I mean obeying shortcut keys and conventions of the desktop world. Having alt+letter assignments to boxes and functions, Tab moves between elements, pressing PageUp/PageDown while in a text entry area for a chat window scrolls the chat history above and not the text entry area (looking at you SimpleX), etc.
Sorry, not sorry. Web interface is interface-smell, and I avoid it as much as possible. Give me a TUI before a webpage.
> its just waaaaaay easier to distribute a web app
Let's also remember that it's infinitely easier to keep a native app operational, since there's no web server to set up or maintain.
To be fair, probably most of us here on HN write software to put food on the table. Don’t pooh-pooh our careers.
Both can be true: we can have different preferences about what we're doing to put food on the table and what we're doing when we build something on our own for other reasons.
He didn't pooh-pooh anyone's careers.
The way it's worded comes across that way.
I have spent a good deal of my life writing software to put food on the table. I didn't interpret any of what he wrote in the way you describe. Perhaps you could explain why you did.
Attitudes like these is why non-developers don't want to use open source software.
These concerns may not matter to you, the developer, but they absolutely matter to end-users.
If your prospective user can't find the setup.exe they just downloaded, they won't be able to use your software. If your conversion and onboarding sucks, they'll get confused and try the commercial offering instead. If you don't gather analytics and A/B test, you won't even know this is happening. If you're not the first result on Google, they'll try the commercial app first.
Users want apps that work consistently on all their devices and look the same on both desktop and mobile, keep their data when they spill coffee on the laptop, and let them share content on Slack with people who don't have the app installed. Open source doesn't have good answers to these problems, so let's not shoot ourselves in the foot even further.
This presupposes that the OSS creator even wants users in the first place, which might not always be the case as it could be personal software; and that these users actually want these features, as many do not want analytics, ads, and A/B tests in your app.
I guess in the same way that one might presuppose a boat wants water?
If a piece of software doesn’t have users and the developers don’t care about the papercuts they are delivering, I would argue what they have created is more of an art project than a utility.
Science research without obvious practical application can still be important and valuable.
Art works without popular appeal can become highly treasured by some.
Open source software doesn't have to be ambitious to be worthwhile and useful. It can be artful, utilitarian or a artifact of play. Commercial standards shouldn't be the only measure of good software.
It's more like building your own boat then someone else coming along and saying it'll never compete with a cruise ship because it doesn't have a water slide and endless buffet; sometimes, things in the same category can serve wholly different purposes.
>Attitudes like these is why non-developers don't want to use open source software.
Good! It's not for them! They can stay paypigs on subscription because they can't git gud!
I'm a seasoned developer and I frequently come across OSS projects where I spend half an hour or more in "how the fuck do I actually use this"-land. A lot of developers need to take the mindset of writing the documentation for their non-tech grandma from the ground up.
LLMs to the rescue
It's the principle.
Not off to a great start... The "look how many steps it takes to convert shareware users" is insanely overblown.
1-4. Google, find, read... this is the same for web apps. 2. Click download and wait a few seconds. Not enough time to give up because native apps are small. Heavy JS web apps might load for longer than that. 3. Click on the executable that the browser pops up in front of you. No closing the browser or looking for your downloads folder. It's right there! 3.5. You probably don't need an installer and it definitely doesn't need a multi-step wizard. Maybe a big "install" button with a smaller "advanced options". 3.6. Your installer (if you even have it) autostarts the program after finishing 4. The user uses it and is happy. 5. Some time later, the program prompts the user to pay, potentially taking them directly onto the payment form either in-app or by opening it in a browser. 6. They enter their details and pay.
That's one step more than a web app, but also a much bigger chance the user will come back to pay (you can literally send them a popup, you're a native app!).
If my failing memory serves, those were valid concerns in 2009, when this was written.
This is from 2009, and the title should say so.
yeah perfect, i came in here to say
I'm done making web apps (2026).
seriously desktop apps kinda own i just desktop-app'd a pwa made it do SSO auth at my org and now its just part of the self-serve application download kiosk and we're laughing at all the pain we've endured for so many years writing up proposals and billing to scale up web app infra for internal tooling and stuff.
im kinda enjoying coming back to earth right now with my team and we're just hmmmmmmm'ing a lot of things like this. we've had devops chasing 23498234892% availability with k8s and load balancers and all this stuff and we're now assessing how much of that cruft was completely unnecessary and made everything some amorphous blob of complexity and unpredictable billing & and really gave devops a moat to just say "no" to so many things that came through the pipeline. there's so many things that can just be dragged back to like an actual on premise machine and served up through the internal network. we are... amused at how self-important we made ourselves out to be this past decade.
we're probably like days worth of goofing away from going to buy a few mac minis and plug it into some uninterruptable power supplies and just seeing how un-serious we can get with so much tooling we've built over the years. and for everything else, desktop apps. seriously desktop apps is like free infrastructure if you build it right.
I wonder what the numbers say about desktop applications now, and how much the arrival of Electron changed things up here.
Nowadays, it seems to be that mobile apps have the "best metrics" for b2c software. I'd be interested to read a contemporary version of this article.
“Metrics”
This reminds me of a past job working for an e-commerce company. This wasn’t a store like Amazon that “everyone” uses weekly, it was a specific pricey fashion brand. They had put out a shitty iOS app, which was just a very bare-bones wrapper around the website. But they raved about how much better the conversion rate rates were there. Nobody would listen to me about how the customers that bother downloading a specific app for shopping at a particular retailer are obviously just superfans so of course that self-selected group converts well.
So many people who should be smart based on their job titles and salaries, got the causation completely backwards!
Hey, I notice this kind of thing all the time. People use "data" to tell the story they want to -- similar to how it seems humans make a decision subconsciously then weave a rational decision to back it up afterwards.
Do you have principles on how to tackle this? I feel stuck between the irrationality of anecdata and the irrationality of lying with numbers. As if the only useful statistic is one I collect and calculate myself. And, even then, I could be lying to myself.
Survivorship bias
This stupidity might go a long way towards explaining the relentless push towards apps.
Some of us are still making a living from desktop apps, 17 years later.
Please tell your tales. We beseech thee of thine humble wisdom.
I've written about it lots at:
https://www.successfulsoftware.net
In 2026, the number of mobile applications in the App Store and Google Play increased by 60% year over year, largely because entry into the market has become much easier thanks to AI.
What 'best metrics'?
I think in this case it can be approximated as 'largest market'
I'd wager there are more people paying for software for their smart phone than any other platform they use.
Having my credit card already is an overwhelming advantage for the Apple App store and for Steam. I won’t say it is impossible to overcome, but I think I could count on my fingers the number of instances where I, like, typed my card into a website to buy anything, in the last decade.
Yes, but they are mostly paying little or nothing. How much did you spend on phone apps this year? And ads pay a pittance, unless you have massive scale.
Anecdotally, conversion - from free to trial, trial to paid, one-off purchases, etc.
Electron is the worst of both worlds. I have never paid for an Electron app, and never will. Horrid UX.
> I have never paid for an Electron app
Your employer most likely has.
Sure, and so has my government. But I can only control what I personally pay for.
> However, the existence of pirates is a stitch in my craw, particularly when any schoolmarm typing the name of my software into Google is prompted to try stealing it instead:
I wonder whether Google, in its Don't Be Evil era, ever considered what they should do about software piracy, and what they decided.
I'd guess they would've decided to either discourage piracy, or at least not encourage it.
In the screenshot, the Google search query doesn't say anything about wanting to pirate, yet Google is suggesting piracy, a la entrapment.
(Though other history about that user may suggest a software piracy tendency, but still, Google knows what piracy seeking looks like, and they special-case all sorts of other topics.)
Is the ethics practice to wait to be sued or told by a regulator to stop doing something?
Or maybe they anticipate costs and competition for how they operate, and lobby for the regulation they want, so all they have to do is be compliant with it, and be let off the hook for lawsuits?
"Piracy" today is not stealing IP. It's not even what it used to mean, when it was originally used to describe rogue publishers who violated copyright. IP laws as used today against private downloaders and users are the legalization of plundering of people who do the equivalent of hear a fact/idea and act on it or use it. IP cannot be stolen, an "immunity from plundering" fee is what's being paid (license). The whole justification for it with software, namely copying from disc/internet to local storage, and then copying from local storage into RAM, is a legal formality to facilitate this plundering.
It is plundering those who didn't pay you for legal immunity.
Did Google ever have a real Don't be Evil era?
The original expression came out of an internal company discussion that someone summarized (paraphrased) as "when there's a tough choice to make, one is usually less evil. Make that choice."
In the early days of Google in the public consciousness, this turned into "you can make money without being evil." (From the 2004 S-1.)
Over time, it got shortened to "don't be evil." But this phrase became an obligatory catchphrase for anyone's gripes against Google The Megacorp. Hey, Google, how come there's no dark mode on this page? Whatever happened to "don't be evil"? It didn't serve its purpose anymore, so it was dropped.
Answering your question really depends on your priors. I could see someone honestly believing Google was never in that era, or that it has always been from the start. I strongly believe that the original (and today admittedly stale) sentiment has never changed.
Making a loud affair out its retirement rather than quietly letting it collect dust and be forgotten over time was most definitely not a good idea.
The public already demonstrated that they adopted, misused and weaponized the maxim. Its retirement just sharpened the edge of that weapon. Now instead of "What happened to don't be evil?" it's become "Of course Google is being evil." and everything exists in that lens.
A similar dynamic is playing out with Anthropic, whose founders left OpenAI in part over a philosophical split that could be described, if you'll grant a little literary license appropriate to this thread, as Anthropic choosing the "don't be evil" path. No surprise that we now see HN commentary skewering Anthropic for not living up to it.
They had to at least nominally have it, early on, to be able to hire the best Internet-savvy people.
Tech industry culture today is pretty much finance bro culture, plus a couple decades of domain-specific conditioning for abuse.
But at the time Google started, even the newly-arrived gold rush people didn't think like that.
And the more experienced people often had been brought up in altruistic Internet culture: they wanted to bring the goodness to everyone, and were aware of some abuse threats by extrapolating from non-Internet society.
If you need to sloganize a reminder to yourself to not be evil, that's not a promising sign
Early in Google's history, I took that sentiment as saying that they were one of us (Internet people), and weren't going to act like Microsoft (at the time, regarded by Internet people as an underhanded and ignorant company). Even though Google had a very nice IR function and general cluefulness, and seemed destined to be big and powerful.
And if it were the altruistic Internet people they hired, the slogan/mantra could be seen as a reminder to check your ego/ambition/enthusiasm, as well as a shorthand for communicating when you were doing that, and that would be respected by everyone because it had been blessed from the top as a Prime Directive.
Today, if a tech company says they aspire not to be evil: (1) they almost certainly don't mean it, in the current culture and investment environment, or they wouldn't have gotten money from VCs (who invest in people motivated like themselves); (2) most of their hires won't believe it, except perhaps new grads who probably haven't thought much about it; and (3) nobody will follow through on it (e.g., witness how almost all OpenAI employees literally signed to enable the big-money finance-bro coup of supposedly a public interest non-profit).
I took it to mean, prioritize long-term growth over short-term income. But the slogan was silly even back then, like obviously an evil company would claim to not be evil.
If it was silly, a lot of altruistic people nevertheless fell for it.
For example, my impression at the time was that people thought that Google would be a responsible steward of Usenet archives:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer#Preserving_Usene...
FWIW, it absolutely was believable to me at the time that another Internet person would do a company consistent with what I saw as the dominant (pre-gold-rush) Internet culture.
For example of a personality familiar to more people on HN, one might have trusted that Aaron Swartz was being genuine, if he said he wanted to do a company that wouldn't be evil.
(I had actually proposed a similar corporate rule to a prospective co-founder, at a time when Google might've still been hosted at Stanford. Though the co-founder was new to Internet, and didn't have the same thinking.)
In other words the company made a bet on peoples naivety and it worked.
'99 to 2004. You had to have been there, maaaan...
I've been there when Google was altavista.digital.com ;)
Over a decade of circular "web apps are better for the subset of problems webapps are good at" tautologies.
Web apps weren't so easy to make back then, so standalone apps were the norm. Shortly before 2009 a lot of the web apps were Java or Adobe Flash, and 2009 was part of the transition period where platforms were at war with that stuff but open-web alternatives weren't mature yet.
Yeah I know I was there -- also today's wasteful "open-web alternatives" wouldn't fly anyway, because I recall even during the XP era having min-specs of, like, 800mhz/512mb
Yeah, they were like "Flash is too slow" then the replacement was 5x slower
Grass always looks greener on the other side, mainly because it's been fertilised.
No, "grass always looks greener on the other side" is a perspective thing. If you stand on your own grass then you look down onto it and see the dirt, but if you look over to the other side you see the gras from the side which makes it look more dense and hides the dirt. But it's the same boring grass everywhere. :)
hah, i have been arguing this for years. first time to see someone else making the same argument. nice!
At first, I thought "this is missing the point of the phrase" and moved on, but now I'm back to say it's stuck in my head and an intuitive, pretty neat way to think about it.
I preferred GPs poop joke version but to each their own.
It's hard to believe not only that this is 17 years old, but that I remember when he posted it!
Lol, it's less than 10 years old. The 80s were 20 years ago.
Never depend on anything you can't later privateer when the publisher decides to retroactively change the deal (or worse: when they become a subscription "service"). Minimize regular payment sinks. Owning your own infrastructure will always be cheaper in the long run; when you rent, you're paying the cost of ownership plus maintenance plus profit. Sure there may be an economy of scale, but what are you trading for that scale (loss of privacy, loss of sovereignty, loss of ownership, loss of control)?
Just. Don't. Subscribe.
Simple!
Nothing in this article is wrong, but worth noting that pre-AI, the companies that most significantly transformed the way we use our computers (Slack, Spotify, VS Code, etc.) did ship desktop apps.
“Desktop Apps”? I’d say pre-Electron, the ones that existed that far back shipped desktop apps, but for the past 10-15 years it’s all been Electron slop, which hardly qualify as “desktop apps” in my book.
If anything, it’s my very faint hope that AI would give companies - especially non-software companies - the bandwidth to release two real native apps instead of just 2 builds of a shitty Electron app. Fat chance though, I think, not least because companies love to use their “bRaNdInG” on everything - so the native look and feel a real app gives you “for free” is a downside for the clowns that do the visual design for most companies.
For what it’s worth, I tried making a GTK4 app. I got started, created a window, created a header bar, then went to add a url/path entry widget and everything fell apart.
Entry suggestions/completions are formally deprecated with no replacement since 2022. When I did get them working on the deprecated API there was an empty completion option that would segfault if clicked. The default behaviour didn’t hide completions on window unfocus, so my completions would hover over any other open window. There was seemingly no way to disambiguate tab vs enter events… it just sucked.
So after adding one widget I abandoned the project. It felt like the early releases of SwiftUI where you could add a list view but then would run into weird issues as soon as you tried adding stuff to it.
Similarly trying to build an app for macOS practically depends on Swift by Sundell Hacking with Swift or others to make up for Apple’s lack of documentation in many areas. For years stuff like NSColor vs Color and similar API boundaries added friction, and the native macOS SwiftUI components just never felt normal while I tried making apps.
As heavy as web libraries and electron are, at least work mostly out of the box.
There are definitely a shortage of good GUI toolkits - making one is a huge undertaking. GTK is mediocre, as you discovered.
QtWidgets is extremely good though, even if it is effectively in maintenance mode.
Avalonia also seems good too though I haven't used it myself.
I've used Qt off and on, and it's generally worked as advertised. Although when drawing very short lines on a canvas way back when (~2004), it wouldn't do a great job and I had to hack in custom routines that did a much better job.
For prototyping / one-offs, I've always enjoyed working in Tcl/Itcl and Tk/Itk - object oriented Tcl with a decent set of widgets. It's not going to set the world on fire, but it's pretty portable (should mostly work on every platform with minor changes), has a way to package up standalone executables, can ship many-files-as-one with an internal filesystem, etc..
Of course, I spent ~15 years in EDA, so it's much more comfortable than for most people, but it can easily be integrated into C/C++ as well with SWIG, etc.
>Although when drawing very short lines on a canvas way back when (~2004), it wouldn't do a great job and I had to hack in custom routines that did a much better job.
QCanvas (or was it QGraphicsCanvas?) has long since been replace with QGraphicsScene, which is much more capable and doesn't suffer from pixelation issues.
Probably. We paid thousands / year for the developer seat in our startup, and in the end, it wasn't great. I did manage to make the Tcl/Tk event loop and the Qt event loop work together, so we could have Tk windows inside a Qt app!
There is a small business licence.
> I've always enjoyed working in Tcl/Itcl and Tk/Itk
In the near future I need to lash up a windows utility to generate a bunch of PDF files from a CSV (in concert with GhostScript), with specific filenames. I was trying to figure out the best approach and hadn't even considered Tcl and Tk - with Itcl you might have just given me a new rabbithole to explore! Thanks! (...I think!)
I hope it works out! It's amazing how far Tcl/Tk has come since I "had" to use it as a wrapper around an X11 window back on an SGI Irix, using Tcl scripting to interface to an OpenGL backend. I think that was like 7.3.x or something in 1994. And it was pretty cool back then already! The team around Tcl is small, but dedicated and brilliant, IMHO.
Qt is still under very active development. Although there seems to be a lot more emphasis on QML than the widgets side of things for some time.
> If anything, it’s my very faint hope that AI would give companies - especially non-software companies - the bandwidth to release two real native apps instead of just 2 builds of a shitty Electron app.
Anthropic has the resources of a fully armed and operational Claude Mythos (eyeroll), but they still choose to shit out an electron app on all of their users instead of going native like their competitors have done.
All of those examples are web apps, two of them started on the web itself, and none of them transformed anything about how we used our computers (slack replaced a number of competitors, spotify is iTunes for the web, and VS code is a smaller jetbrains)
[2009]
Flutter has brought the joy of desktop gui programming back for me. Especially in this vibe coding era, building all those apps that only really have value to me has never been easier. And seeing the support for Flutter from Canonical has been nice. They’ve been helping make flutter on Linux better
From the article: "for the last three years I’ve sold Bingo Card Creator.
That's a job for a web page. It doesn't need to be installed.
I would like to go back to 2009 =) The world was definitely simpler, and Bitcoin was cheaper =)
Please pick up a few bitcoins for me too when you go there
Realizing I could frickin mine enough bitcoins overnight back then to probably be set for life (maybe for multiple generations) now, is one of my biggest life regrets. I assume it’s shared with all other people who were into tech back then but dismissed bitcoin as stupid, as I did.
You simply can't get hung up on what could have been. Same applies to trying to time the stock market... should have bought, should have sold. Best thing is to know there's nothing that can be done about the past and move along and deal with what you can do now instead.
You're right. What gets me though is that unlike the stock market, bitcoin was an incredibly rare occurrence where anyone could have gotten extraordinarily rich without even incurring any risk! (besides a couple evenings spent learning how to use it.) Whereas to have $10MM today in GOOG stock, I would have had to invest over $300k in 2010.
> without even incurring any risk!
That's not true at all, any number of things could have killed bitcoin in its infancy. The stakes were just low. Somewhere out there is a lost collection of wallets of mine, collectively holding ~100btc ($1000 at the time). If regulators cracked down hard, that 100btc would have become just as worthless and either way I'd be out $1000.
"Risk" is an epistemic claim about the future taking the worse path. Obviously looking back it looks like risk-free money. That's not how it looked at the time. The "currency of the future" thing was always niche, especially after the crash in 2013, until a much larger cultural shift happened around 2015-ish.
Plenty of people will chime in with early bitcoin stories, and how they always believed it was going to go to the moon, etc. I always find it curious because my memory of the time period is that it was a means to an end, and that's how the overwhelming majority saw it and treated it. Funnily enough, it was thanks to that overwhelming majority that led to it being worth anything at all. If it was just a bunch of yahoos clamoring about the "currency of the future" thing, it probably would have gone absolutely fucking nowhere. The irony that the yahoos ended up becoming the majority I think is underappreciated.
Every year since around 2014, friends and family would ask whether they should buy Bitcoin, and every year I told them that I had looked into Bitcoin, I fully understood what Bitcoin was and how it worked, and I recommended that they not invest in Bitcoin because it was stupid. And every year, my advice has been disastrously wrong. Who knows, maybe 2026 will be the first time I'm right.
I put my compute in those days to help do some kind of protein folding simulation, definitely should of been bitcoin.
So true, no real SaaS, no heavy cloud infrastructures
I was curious why AI wasn't mentioned. Then I noticed the date: 2009.
And, I also I think many of the mobile and web apps will end up in prompting in the next few years.
I’m actually hopping on the desktop applications train. Though not for money. I just think the browser is becoming a surveillance plague of computing and we need MORE high quality desktop software not built on the invasive web stack to counter it.
We should do more of this, hacker news, surface 17 year old articles and then debate like they were written yesterday!
I have lot and hate relationship with windows native desktop application. As a kid, I use to look for something GUI application and .exe application since they are breeze to run and just felt right. Now in my day job, I just dislike developing for windows desktop application - partly probably the application is massive and super slow to develop or just there isn't a lot of investment from the company stand point into the product.
which circle are we in?
Condemned to useless labor, I beleive that's the 4th circle.
feels more like 8, living in times of mass-fraud.
> Web Applications Convert Better
ok, now do this analysis for mobile apps...
Fuck. Web. Apps.
> Why I'm Done Making Desktop Applications
To save you a click: It's harder to monetize desktop apps than webapps.
Lol. LMAO, even.
Didn't HN have a "no clickbait titles" rule?
It's not clickbait though
it's amazing how freeing working an office job is. my personal projects don't have concerns such as monetization.
On the other hand I spent 25 years selling desktop software and never once had an annual review. I never had to submit an application for time off. I never had to ask permission for a dentist appointment. If the weather was good I could take the day off and go for a bike ride. I didn’t attend any scrum meetings nor did I have to argue about what framework to use with a PM who couldn’t code FizzBuzz.
yeah but i get paid to use the toilet in my own home
ig remote work is the best of both worlds
Great, good riddance. Hopefully open source and/or AI push this person out of developing entirely.
People who focus this much on "conversion" et al are dinosaurs who deserve extinction.
First up, this article is 17 years old. There's no reason to assume the author has exactly the same opinions today.
More importantly, the author is talking about the realities of trying to earn a decent living shipping independent software. That requires paying customers.
It's perfectly reasonable to want to be paid for your work, and it certainly doesn't warrant the vitriol in your comment.
Is a commercial software vendor not supposed to care how many sales they make?
Please tell me at least you don't work some software corp where it's someone else's job to worry about the business, if you're going to pass that kind of judgement.
The author (who is a frequent commenter here) started a company called Appointment Reminder after writing this, which for years was my favorite example of an independent small company that identified a niche, served it well, and then went on to be acquired.
There's an interview with him on the subject that is sadly behind a paywall now: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-my-appointment-...
The world has changed a lot since then. The days where 37 Signals could build an empire out of simple web form apps and individuals could build and sell a SaaS that sends reminder texts are long gone. Most of the low hanging fruit was mined out long ago and most simple services have seen 100 different startups try to serve them already.
As much as Appointment Reminder was my prime example of a successful indie SaaS, the author's second startup has (with all due respect) become one of my prime examples of not validating product-market fit before building your product. They went on to build Starfighter, a company that was supposed to be a candidate vetting platform where people could do complex coding challenges and then get matched up with companies wanting to hire people. It was built partially in the open through their newsletter and in Hacker News posts.
If you thought doing LeetCode problems to get interviews was annoying, imagine having to spend hours or days going through a CTF where you hack multi-core CPUs to do something complex with a simulated stock market. I can't even remember the entire premise, but every time I read something about the company it was getting more and more complex. At the same time I was on other forums where candidates were going the opposite direction: becoming frustrated with the proliferation of coding interviews and refusing to do interview challenges that would take hours of their time.
I remember through the entire process thinking that it seemed like a questionable business plan that wouldn't really appeal to companies or to candidates. Even the Hacker News comments were full of (surprisingly polite) feedback saying that investing a lot of hours into solving programming puzzles to maybe get some recruiter interest wasn't appealing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10480390
Some amazing foreshadowing in that thread from one of the co-founders (not Patrick McKenzie):
> I literally lack the ability to form coherent sentences about our business that don't somehow involve how to render a graph of AVR basic blocks in a React web app, is how little we're thinking about how the game interacts with recruiting right now.
> We are going to get the CTF right, and then work from there to a sustainable recruiting business. We should have done it the other way around, but we didn't. :)
As you might have guessed, it didn't work out at all. It was weird for me to follow one of my indie startup heroes on their journey into their second business that skipped all of the normal startup advice and then reached the exact conclusion that advice was warning against.
It was enlightening to follow along and I'm glad they tried something different and shared it along the way, but watching it happen was a turning point for me in how I approach advice from any one individual author, blogger, writer, or influencer.
The majority of software products don't work out.
Correct. That's why it's a mistake to build big, complex products before testing the business model.
Well ... 17 years ago.
"Over roughly the same period my day job has changed and transitioned me from writing thick clients in Swing to big freaking enterprise web apps."
I mean, the web kind of won. We just don't have a simple and useful way to design for the web AND the desktop at the same time. I also use the www of course, with a gazillion of useful CSS and JavaScript where I have to. I have not entirely given up on the desktop world, but I abandoned ruby-gtk and switched to ... jruby-swing. I know, I know, nobody uses swing anymore. The point is not so much about using swing per se, but simply to have a GUI that is functional on windows, with the same code base (I ultimately use the same code base for everything on the backend anyway). I guess I would fully transition into the world wide web too, but how can you access files on the filesystem, create directories etc... without using node? JavaScript is deliberately restricted, node is pretty awful, ruby-wasm has no real documentation.