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

Huh? Given how most web applications these days are using client-side rendering there's nothing stopping someone from just downloading all of the frontend assets. You can also connect to a server from your desktop application so I don't understand how desktop makes it easier to pirate anything.

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

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

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

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

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

So by trial and error, I found that I need to load the page before disconnecting, and only use the 1st of the 5 buttons on the side (even "About" requires network connectivity). Then it works offline. Which is pretty cool!

But every native application I have works perfectly offline, and I don't need to do anything special ahead of time, or worry about which parts might not be available. There's a big difference between "some parts may work offline sometimes" and "entire app will definitely work offline always".

From decades of experience, when a "trivial" app struggles with demoing a feature, there's little chance it'll be widely supported among real apps. PWAs have been "any day now!" for 10 years now.

I'd say that that when you're writing an application which is fundamentally just a pretty wrapper (e.g. it exists to take user input and pipe it over HTTP to some web service or use it to generate a command for some other binary) and your users don't care about performance, resource usage or reliability, it makes sense to use a browser. Your application is very UI-focused and if you're already familiar with HTML, CSS and JS, use what you know.

However if you're working on an application that has strict resource usage, reliability and/or performance requirements like say a control system for industrial equipment, a 3D game, a video encoder, photo editing software, or software that's going to be run on an embedded system, you're going to find it difficult to do what needs to be done with a browser/wrapper. It can be done for sure but it'll be something you work around rather than with.

The trouble with Electron apps though (and most Node apps) is the sheer number of dependencies. It's just infeasible to package them for a distro if you care about their dependencies being packaged as well - at least, not without the entire process being automated.