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

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

#91

Post by seventh-chord »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #27

Every single app that I use, I try and make sure it is native. I shun electron apps at all cost. It's because people who put in effort to use the native APIs put in a lot more effort in the app in general based on my anecdotal evidence. It is also more performant and smaller in size, things that I cherish. It also pays homage to limits and striving to come up with new ways of overcoming them, which hackers would have…

The " is cheap" mantra also really only makes sense if you are writing server code, where you yourself pay for all the memory your code will ever use. If you deploy code to a large number of users it makes little sense. If a million users start your app daily, and your app has a 5 second load time and uses 300mb of ram, you are wasting over 50 days of user time, and hogging close to 300 terabytes of ram.

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

#92

Post by kleiba »

WaltPurvis wrote: post #86

If 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…

I don't get the downvotes: the original question asked about opinions on web-based vs. native apps, and this guys is giving exactly that. And what else could you do, you can either cite some usage statistics or give personal assessments.

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

#93

Post by dx87 »

SllX wrote: post #50
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #27

Every single app that I use, I try and make sure it is native. I shun electron apps at all cost. It's because people who put in effort to use the native APIs put in a lot more effort in the app in general based on my anecdotal evidence. It is also more performant and smaller in size, things that I cherish. It also pays homage to limits and striving to come up with new ways of overcoming them, which hackers would have…

Agreed. If you have a CPU from 2012 onwards, 16GB of RAM and an SSD, that’s a respectable hardware setup. It might not be the fastest piece of kit on the planet, but I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t last another 3 to 5 years without feeling slow. Electron apps invariably make such kit feel slower than it actually is. You can get good performance out of even older hardware if you treat it well and load it with g…

Yep, the new Steam library being a bloated web app is what forced me to install more RAM. I normally don't close out of applications when I'm not using them, so I was always hovering around ~6-7 of my 8 gigs of RAM in use. Then they update the library to the new bloated version, and my computer starts freezing because the library memory footprint is so much larger that my computer was having to use over a gig of swap space.

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

#96

Post by ComputerGuru »

alkonaut wrote: post #89

Take 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…

Tell that to Autodesk. Fusion is like 70% web, slow, and bloated. They don’t even have a good excuse since the whole UI is just a shell around a canvas and could easily be made native, it’s not as if they’re actually benefiting from the DOM or CSS.

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

#97

Post by [deleted] »

egypturnash wrote: post #82
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #27

Every single app that I use, I try and make sure it is native. I shun electron apps at all cost. It's because people who put in effort to use the native APIs put in a lot more effort in the app in general based on my anecdotal evidence. It is also more performant and smaller in size, things that I cherish. It also pays homage to limits and striving to come up with new ways of overcoming them, which hackers would have…

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.

[deleted]

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

#98

Post by bobblywobbles »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #27

Every single app that I use, I try and make sure it is native. I shun electron apps at all cost. It's because people who put in effort to use the native APIs put in a lot more effort in the app in general based on my anecdotal evidence. It is also more performant and smaller in size, things that I cherish. It also pays homage to limits and striving to come up with new ways of overcoming them, which hackers would have…

I admire your words here.

I am on the other side, building electron apps, I appreciate the flexibility and ease because I would rather iterate on ideas then learn three different OS-hooks.

I do agree that memory usage is too high on these types of apps and we as developers can be lax about performance.

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

#99

Post by znpy »

implicit wrote: post #71

If you are going to expect me to run your software in an always-on manner, I would greatly appreciate a native application. I frequently do light computing on a Surface Go. It's a delightful little device and I love it, but it is not powerful enough that I can leave gmail, Slack, and Discord open all the time. I don't have enough RAM to run another web application but I could very easily afford a native app or two.

I have an old ThinkPad X200s that I turn on from time to time. I keep a fedora installed and updated just in case, and since I'm there, i also sync my nextcloud stuff.

E-mails using claws-mail are not a problem. It generally runs fast enough until I open firefox and web stuff in general.

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

#100

Post by kleiba »

user_50123890 wrote: post #90

Don'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.

Please take a look at actual screenshots from the 90's to quickly disprove your assessment.

The only other argument you mention is that native apps take much longer to develop, and that from that somehow follow that they are "shitty". I'm not even convinced the premise is correct, but I certainly don't see why longer development times would imply worse outcomes...

Intuitively, I would assume the opposite: something that is put together all too quickly should have a higher potential for being half-baked.

I'm not criticizing your preference, I just don't buy the arguments.

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