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Ask HN: Are there any startups making desktop apps?

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11–20 of 83 posts

Re: Ask HN: Are there any startups making desktop apps?

#11
I have seen some but they are not in the B2C space. Usually in specialty B2B space.

A lot of medical applications (signal processing, visualization, robot control) tend to be traditional desktop applications.

Also military applications for analysis, and planning are often desktop based because they can not use consumer mobile devices nor can they rely on the "cloud".

Re: Ask HN: Are there any startups making desktop apps?

#12

Evernote? https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/evernote

evernote's motto is "notes everywhere" or smt like that. They are building desktop app yes, but this app is also js and browser extension.

not counts. sorry evernote, I loved you though.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any startups making desktop apps?

#13
post #5

Actually most are making native mobile apps. I'm a mobile guy making a cross compatible web app. Why anyone would make a native app in our world of ECMAScript6 and HTML5 is beyond me.

Where do you get the statistic that "most" HN folks are making native mobile apps? Are you sure it's not server-side software, or machine-independent code, or something else?

i.e. [citation needed]

Also, the reasons people make native mobile apps rather than hybrid apps (which run inside a mobile web-player component) are speed and reliability. Famously, Facebook switched from HTML5 to native for their iOS app:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...

Re: Ask HN: Are there any startups making desktop apps?

#16
http://www.jamkazam.com - we are not yet VC-backed, but I hope so soon.

Because latency is an absolute premium for playing music in real-time across the internet, we've focused first on the desktop, where we have the most control ... but still find a ton of challenges.

If you saw this recent article about Android and audio latency, you can see why there are challenges in the mobile space: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9386994

If you were to try and build a web-only version of JamKazam, WebRTC is your best bet but it does not have low enough latency, either.

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