Not having a real native desktop player is why I won't subscribe to Spotify. When I'm going to use something more than lightly, I hate using applications that feel like web tech. But I realize I'm in the minority.
Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
81–90 of 777 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
#82Every single app that I use, I try and make sure it is native. I shun electron apps at all cost. It's because people who put in effort to use the native APIs put in a lot more effort in the app in general based on my anecdotal evidence. It is also more performant and smaller in size, things that I cherish. It also pays homage to limits and striving to come up with new ways of overcoming them, which hackers would have…
Slack desktop app is almost 1 gig in size.
On a whim I just checked how big the copy of Adium still lingering in my Mac is: 60 megs.
And Ripcord (a native discord/slack client) is a mere 40.
Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
#83It depends on what you’re developing, who the target users are and how much you need to charge to sustain yourself. It also depends on your skills and how much time you’re willing to invest in creating a desktop application (doing one that’s cross platform, that performs well and works like a native app on each platform would take a significant amount of effort). Native desktop apps targeted at the average user are b…
>Native desktop apps targeted at the average user are better done on macOS, since that platform has a higher percentage of users who will pay (compared to the percentage of users who’d just pirate it).
That was always the standard wisdom. However I have released the same software on Windows and Mac and seen significantly worse piracy for the Mac version.
Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
#84Not having a real native desktop player is why I won't subscribe to Spotify. When I'm going to use something more than lightly, I hate using applications that feel like web tech. But I realize I'm in the minority.
Reads comment. Cocks head, curiously. Closes eyes, listens to the music coming from his computer. Opens eyes, alt-tabs to the Spotify app. Closes all web browsers. Music continues, uninterrupted except by ads. Shrugs, goes on with his day.
Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
#85After using Photopea (web) as a virtually full replacement for Photoshop (desktop), I'm starting to think that these days, all interfaces and business logic should be web-first. JavaScript is fast, other languages can compile to it or WebAssembly, and HTML+CSS is a lingua franca. Obviously PWA's are required, designed to run offline. Where brute-force performance is a #1 concern I think it diverges. For things like P…
Speed in relative terms means that JavaScript in the browser is not fast. The language runs on top of just about as many abstraction layers as possible and I do not envy this world you describe. I wish we’d move away from it.
But it's fast enough. JIT compilation means algorithms run decently fast, and when it deals with the DOM it's fast enough for everyday interface tasks.
Nobody's saying it's elegant. But it's cross-platform and it's a standard that lots of people know. Wishing we move away from it seems like a lost battle at this point -- at least unless we somehow invent a brand-new computing paradigm that replaces browsers, the way browsers have replaced apps in many cases. But I can't even imagine what that might ever be.
Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
#86If you develop an application that runs in the web browser, I won't use it. That's not some dogmatic principle of mine, it's just an empirical fact.
I use only one browser-based application: Gmail.
I've never used another browser-based application and I can't imagine that I ever will unless there's truly no alternative and it's forced on me by an employer.
I've happily paid for dozens of desktop applications, and I'm even semi-happily paying for around ten of them that have switched to a subscription model, but I never have and likely never will use browser-based applications even if they're free.
Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
#87Every single app that I use, I try and make sure it is native. I shun electron apps at all cost. It's because people who put in effort to use the native APIs put in a lot more effort in the app in general based on my anecdotal evidence. It is also more performant and smaller in size, things that I cherish. It also pays homage to limits and striving to come up with new ways of overcoming them, which hackers would have…
It is true that there is a a correlation between lower level programming and better programming in general. You probably won't see someone writing asm but creating crazy O^2 algorithms that run on every frame with memory allocations that run in the inner loop.
At the same time a native win32 program can pack significant functionality into a 20KB exe. Put these together and you have a program where everything is instant, all the time on any computer. The original uTorrent was just over 100KB and installed then ran in an instant.
These two refinements together are such a massive difference from any electron program that it melts my brain when people say that it isn't a problem to have a chat program feel like using windows 95 on a 386.
People say talk about needing cross platform programs, but something like fltk has everything most people will need and also runs instantly, while adding only a few hundred kilobytes to an executable.
Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
#88IMO desktop apps aren’t quite equivalent to native apps. Native apps look and behave in a consistent way. They have
• Familiar UI primitives: - Controls and chrome are in the same place - Font sizes are the same across apps - Consistent icons and button shapes
• Support standard keyboard shortcuts (including obscure ones that developers re-implementing these UIs might not know about) - All the Emacs-style keybindings that work in native macOS text fields but are hit-or-miss in custom web text fields - Full keyboard access (letting me tab and use the space bar and arrow keys to interact with controls)
• And consistent, predictable responsiveness cadences - Somewhat contrived example: In Slack (browser or Electron app), switching between channels/DMs (via ⌘K) has a lag of about 0.5–1 second. If I start typing my message for that recipient during this lag, it actually gets saved as a draft in the channel that I just left and my content in the new channel gets truncated. I don’t think that kind of behavior would happen in a native macOS app, which renders UIs completely synchronously by default/in-order (so it might block the UI, but at least interactions will be in a consistent state)
Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
#89Take any app that uses all cores nearly 100%, maybe maxes out the GPU eats 3-5GB of ram, and is a 2-100GB install.
Those will always be native.
These are your Cad programs, your video editors, your AAA games.
You can make a cad program in a browser too. But you trade a chunk of perf for convenience, and thats only rarely acceptable.
Anything that could ever be done in a mobile app (chat, media consumption, ..) those might be possible to do in a browser. But you didn’t even really need a computer for them to begin with.
Re: Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?
#90Don't care, i'll take a good web app over a shitty native app any day.
Since native apps take much longer to develop and the UI toolkits are stuck in the 90s, it's pretty much given nowadays that new ones are shitty compared to the equivalent web one.