The bottom line is that if you care about your users and their experience you'll make a native app for them. Everything else is a tradeoff. There are definitely many application areas where the web is effectively their "native" home so that is all you need but I thought this article did a good job of laying out when that isn't good enough.
Why we maintain desktop apps for OS X, Windows, and a web application
11–20 of 95 posts
Re: Why we maintain desktop apps for OS X, Windows, and a web application
#12"Your users don’t need an authorization to" ... what?
Re: Why we maintain desktop apps for OS X, Windows, and a web application
#13I've been using slack just fine in the browser, haven't had much of a need for a desktop version of it. I can just make a separate chrome instance for it and move it into its own xmonad workspace and switch to it much more conveniently than through alt-tab.
Even the Slack native app is (or at least used to be) a webview wrapped in a native container
Re: Why we maintain desktop apps for OS X, Windows, and a web application
#14"Your users don’t need an authorization to" ... what ?
My guess is she means they don't need authorization to install it if it is a web app, where as a desktop app may need company sign off to install software.
Re: Why we maintain desktop apps for OS X, Windows, and a web application
#15> At Front for example, people using the desktop app spend on average 34% more time on the app that those using the web version. ...maybe I'm crazy, but the primary metric I would evaluate a tool designed to increase business productivity is not how much time I spend using it, and in fact would normally be summarized as the exact opposite of this metric...
I don't know that the exact opposite metric would be useful but I agree their metric doesn't sound useful either.
Re: Why we maintain desktop apps for OS X, Windows, and a web application
#16I've been using slack just fine in the browser, haven't had much of a need for a desktop version of it. I can just make a separate chrome instance for it and move it into its own xmonad workspace and switch to it much more conveniently than through alt-tab.
The desktop application for Slack is basically the same thing as having a dedicated browser window anyway, except probably even heavier-weight, at least in the OS X version. IIRC they use the same JS-on-the-desktop toolkit as Atom, so it's not a desktop application so much as it is a "desktop application". It eats ~400MB(!!!!) of RAM on my laptop at all times and I'm sure the only reason it isn't painfully unresponsive is because modern machines have enormous amounts of processing power. Totally unreasonable for what it does.
Even at that, it's still not as rough on system resources as a browser tab with Asana loaded and left open for a couple days, and all of Google's "applications" are hogs of course. Web Apps: the way of the future! [gag, gag, vomit]
Re: Why we maintain desktop apps for OS X, Windows, and a web application
#17I love it when companies make software that I use on my mobile phone and it syncs with a desktop application as well. As a web developer I appreciate web applications but the experience is almost always better in a native application (at least I've found very few exceptions).
So I'm happy companies like this still provide desktop applications. It would be great if it were more of a trend but I'm not sure that it is yet. If there were better frameworks to use that would allow code reuse across all platforms it would certainly make this easier.
Re: Why we maintain desktop apps for OS X, Windows, and a web application
#18> At Front for example, people using the desktop app spend on average 34% more time on the app that those using the web version. ...maybe I'm crazy, but the primary metric I would evaluate a tool designed to increase business productivity is not how much time I spend using it, and in fact would normally be summarized as the exact opposite of this metric...
I don't know that the exact opposite metric would be useful but I agree their metric doesn't sound useful either.
I think the normal summary would be "the new version of our tool has streamlined numerous features, allowing you to spend less time using our app; testing already reports people spend 30% less time"; the implication, though, left out of the summary, is "and accomplish the same things" (which is why it is only summarized as the exact opposite, but the metric, I agree, is not the exact opposite).
Re: Why we maintain desktop apps for OS X, Windows, and a web application
#19I've been using slack just fine in the browser, haven't had much of a need for a desktop version of it. I can just make a separate chrome instance for it and move it into its own xmonad workspace and switch to it much more conveniently than through alt-tab.
One anecdote from a power user is rather uncompelling.
Re: Why we maintain desktop apps for OS X, Windows, and a web application
#20I love it when companies make software that I use on my mobile phone and it syncs with a desktop application as well. As a web developer I appreciate web applications but the experience is almost always better in a native application (at least I've found very few exceptions). So I'm happy companies like this still provide desktop applications. It would be great if it were more of a trend but I'm not sure that it is y…
> If there were better frameworks to use that would allow code reuse across all platforms it would certainly make this easier.
I feel that this is exactly what web applications try to solve in the first place.