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

During my days of Windows-exclusive computing, I wondered what people meant by native UIs, and why do they care about them. My wondering stopped when I discovered Mac OS and, to a lesser extent, Ubuntu (especially in the Unity days). Windows, with its lack of visual consistency, looked like a hot mess compared to the aforementioned platforms.

And now that I think about it, would this made it easier, even by an infinitesimal amount, for malware to fool users, as small deviations in UI would fail to stand out?

I love vs code, and its plugin system, but if I’m on my laptop without a charger, I use something else. When I’m running vs code, my battery life is cut nearly in half.

I am constantly annoyed by the web apps, not only because they consume so much resources, but because of the noticeable UI lag that drives me crazy. For example, I have been entertaining the idea recently of building a native Todo app for macOS because of how slow Todoist has become in the past few years.

I think this has changed. People used to be very particular about how their apps looked on different native platforms, like you say. But I don't think it's like that anymore. People are more agnostic now, when it comes to how user interfaces look, because they've seen it all. Especially on the web, where there's really no rules, and where each new site and web app looks different. I believe this also carries over to native apps, and I think there's much more leeway now, for a user interface to look different from the native style, as long as it adheres to any of the general well established abstract principles for how user interface elements ought to behave.

The whole idea of web first has actually made things worse. Let's compare web apps to native desktop apps, shall we?

Memory Usage

A few years ago while trying to figure out why I was running out of RAM, I stumbled upon chrome’s task manager. Gmail was using up 700MB of RAM and all I had open was the Inbox. No fancy search box or Compose, the Inbox was taking up 700MB of RAM to display lines of text in a Tabular format. I’ve been a heavy user of Email clients and if you pick any of the native clients (Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail) and open a bunch of searches and compose windows the memory usage will still stay below 100MB.

I used mIRC a few decades ago to connect to multiple chat servers, run my own bots, serve files over DCC and run scripts all while staying under 20MB of Ram. These days to send a text message over Slack I need over 1GB of RAM. Even basic apps with all of their trackers, external javascript scripts and doms take up 100s of MBs in memory. And the most common solution to running out of memory is to close chrome windows.

Battery/CPU Usage

DOM is slow. Updating layout and repainting is even slow. Javascript being a dynamic language is slow. Web apps are anything but simple these days and since they have to work under the limitations of all the slow components, the CPU ends up making up for it. Chrome is almost always present in my Macbook’s ‘Using significant energy’ tab. On the other hand, I rarely if ever see native apps in the battery bar unless I’m doing something which should actually consume a lot of CPU cycles like running multiple synths in Ableton or Compiling. When apps are built for mobile, battery usage is a major area to optimize on. But nobody even gives it a thought for web apps

60 FPS

Mobile apps run on 60fps, Native desktop apps run at 60fps, Games run ( or at least are designed to) run at 60fps. Instagram on chrome starts at 2-3 fps and usually hovers around 30fps. My laptop which is supposed to be more powerful than my mobile phone is only able to churn out half the frame rate even though they are both running at the same resolution! Web apps are not buttery smooth and can be jerky at times. Sure somebody can work really hard and optimize a website to run at 60fps at all times, but it needs a lot of effort. Mobile apps run at 60fps out of the box without much effort. Mobile and native apps use the GPU a lot more efficiently. Since they have a lot more information about which controls are being used, they can recycle items a lot better and do a much better job at hardware acceleration via the GPU. Not to mention that you have access to raw graphics APIs in case you want to push UI performance even further.

Development Environment You can build desktop apps in a plethora of languages and even for mobile apps you have many cross-platform frameworks. But building for the web(and electron) forces you to HTML/Javascript(and derivates). Javascript is a dynamic prototypical language that was not designed for the scale of apps that are being built in it today. It has no type safety, memory leaks are common and it’s slow due to its dynamic nature. While there have been many efforts to improve performance like V8s JIT, it still lags behind a lot of major languages. WASM seems promising, but it’s still has a long way to go. And it’s laughable how weak the browser platform itself is. SQLite is available on raspberry pi, embeddable systems, mobile platforms and just about every other platform on the planet. You can store data, run complex relational queries and do more with so less. But it is not available on the most widely used platform on the planet, the browser.

With the rise of electron apps, big and bulky web apps have started making their way onto the Desktop. There are some who are even trying to get the same apps on mobile via PWAs. While the web has the advantage of easy accessibility, IMO we have sacrificed too much in terms of user experience for that one convenience. If you built an app with the same UI and functionality in a native language and as a web app, the native app will run circles around it.