<story><title>Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?</title><text>Modern browsers these days are powerful things - almost an operating system in their own right. So I&amp;#x27;m asking the community, should everything now be developed as &amp;#x27;web first&amp;#x27;, or is there still a place for native desktop applications?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrockway</author><text>Native desktop apps are great.&lt;p&gt;The reason that people don&amp;#x27;t write them is because users aren&amp;#x27;t on &amp;quot;the desktop&amp;quot;.  &amp;quot;The desktop&amp;quot; is split between OS X and Windows, and your Windows-app-compiled-for-Mac is going to annoy Mac users and your Mac-app-compiled-for-Windows is going to annoy Windows users.  Then you realize that most users of computing devices actually just use their phone for everything, and your desktop app can&amp;#x27;t run on those.  Then you realize that phones are split between Android and iOS, and there is the same problem there -- Android users won&amp;#x27;t like your iOS UI, and iOS users won&amp;#x27;t like your Android UI.  Then there are tablets.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, your web app may not be as good as native apps, but at least you don&amp;#x27;t have to write it 6 times.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jcelerier</author><text>&amp;gt; Meanwhile, your web app may not be as good as native apps, but at least you don&amp;#x27;t have to write it 6 times.&lt;p&gt;I must be living in a parallel world because I use a ton of desktop apps that aren&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;written 6 times&amp;quot; - and write a few, including a music &amp;amp; other things sequencer (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ossia.io&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ossia.io&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;p&gt;Just amongst the ones running on my desktop right now, Strawberry (Qt), Firefox (their own toolkit), QtCreator (Qt), Telegram Desktop (Qt), Bitwig Studio (Java), Kate (Qt), Ripcord (Qt), all work on all desktop platforms with a single codebase. I also often use Zim (GTK), which is also available on all platforms, occasionnally Krita (Qt) and GIMP (GTK), and somewhat rarely Blender. Not an HTML DOM in sight (except FF :-)).</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Is there still a place for native desktop apps?</title><text>Modern browsers these days are powerful things - almost an operating system in their own right. So I&amp;#x27;m asking the community, should everything now be developed as &amp;#x27;web first&amp;#x27;, or is there still a place for native desktop applications?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrockway</author><text>Native desktop apps are great.&lt;p&gt;The reason that people don&amp;#x27;t write them is because users aren&amp;#x27;t on &amp;quot;the desktop&amp;quot;.  &amp;quot;The desktop&amp;quot; is split between OS X and Windows, and your Windows-app-compiled-for-Mac is going to annoy Mac users and your Mac-app-compiled-for-Windows is going to annoy Windows users.  Then you realize that most users of computing devices actually just use their phone for everything, and your desktop app can&amp;#x27;t run on those.  Then you realize that phones are split between Android and iOS, and there is the same problem there -- Android users won&amp;#x27;t like your iOS UI, and iOS users won&amp;#x27;t like your Android UI.  Then there are tablets.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, your web app may not be as good as native apps, but at least you don&amp;#x27;t have to write it 6 times.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tpush</author><text>Concerning the desktop, I honestly don&amp;#x27;t see Windows users caring much about non-native UIs. Windows apps to this day are a hodgepodge of custom UIs. From driver utilities to everyday programs, there&amp;#x27;s little an average Windows user would identify as a &amp;quot;Windows UI&amp;quot;. And even if, deviations are commonplace and accepted.&lt;p&gt;Linux of course doesn&amp;#x27;t have any standard toolkit, just two dominant ones. There&amp;#x27;s no real expectation of &amp;quot;looking native&amp;quot; here, either.&lt;p&gt;Which leaves macOS. And even there, the amount of users really caring about native UIs are a (loud and very present online) minority.&lt;p&gt;So really, on the Desktop, the only ones holding up true cross-platform UIs are a subset of Mac users.</text></comment>