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Ask HN: Are there any startups making desktop apps?

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61–70 of 83 posts

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

#63

Feem - LAN chat/file transfer utility. cross platform (Linux/Mac OSX/Windows Desktop/"Modern" Windows/Windows Phone/iOS/Android/). Trivia 1: We are based in Cameroon/Africa. Trivia 2: I'm the sole developer.

This is actually a pretty cool tool, going to use this. Frequently need to transfer stuff from my iPhone/iPad/Macbook to and from my windows desktop and google drive is not always necessary :)

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

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't this sales rep use a mobile connected ipad to access a web app with pricing and ordering?

In several industries, sales reps often travel to locations without internet access (such as factory shop-floors, construction sites, mining sites etc). In such cases, the rep simply has to fire up the product catalog, capture orders, take notes etc and then sync up when he returns to an office/hotel room. This is in fact one of the most common reasons for companies to look for native apps.

you can use local storage or a number of other workarounds to solve this problem.

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

#66

http://www.installmonetizer.com/ Probably funded by YC IIRC.

Somebody with too much money should buy this company and then bury it somewhere very deep.

Or, you know, people could start paying for software. (I know, I'm a dreamer.)

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

#67
post #28
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Startup game studios are startups. Many game studios do get acquired or IPO, classic startup end-games. Game studios also satisfy your other criteria, but since when are those criteria for calling a company a startup? For example, a single bad product/service can kill any startup, not just a game studio.

Of course, but generally a startup grows to a certain size and becomes a safe corporation. A game studio is like a startup that can't succeed, only survive. The games industry is pretty unique in the software world in that there's no/little help in old successes. It's got more in common with consulting than it does with Google/Dropbox/Facebook.

Madden NFL is a counterexample. That game came out in 1988. Not many software companies can say they've been working on the same software series since 1988. Will Dropbox still be relevant in 2035?

Madden NFL is not the only example of a "safe", long-running game series (franchise). Wikipedia has a list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-running_video_...

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

#70
post #27
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe less so the case with HN but certainly the case. Just look at Product Hunt where nearly half of today's posts are mobile native apps. Facebook has since built and released React. I'm willing to bet Facebook will switch away from native again.

Facebook is building something they call React Native, which, as I understand it, lets you code an app using JavaScript and web stuff, but then it transforms all of that into native code that gets compiled to run on the various mobile operating systems. I think it's currently iOS-only. Facebook says they're already using it for multiple production apps, but I don't know which ones.

https://facebook.github.io/react-native/

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