What I don't like is WebView distributed as a "native app". It's not native app and it's not something I want to install, don't cheat me. Webpages should stay in browser.<p>I expect native app to be written with Objective C (OS X/iOS user here), having very low memory usage, fast startup and offline usage. Also I expect as much integration with the system, as possible, native controls (not that buggy emulation without my favorite emacs-like keybindings) and native behavior.<p>Probably we miss an important piece of technology: installable web-apps. Website opened in the frameless browser window, identifiable as a different application which could be easily pinned to Launchpad. With all advantages that "separate webview" has, but with some important difference: sandboxing. So I can feel safe when I launch this application, because I don't need to trust all my files, passwords and system to another application. I've seen that kind of technology in the iOS: website bookmark could be pinned as a desktop icon, but it's just a bookmark.
> At Front for example, people using the desktop app spend on average 34% more time on the app that those using the web version.<p>...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...
The alt-tab argument is a strong reminder for me that as good as tabbed browsing is compared to the old IE6 hell, tabs are an absolutely shit paradigm for window management, better than the windows task bar when you have 100 tabs open, but it is about time someone sat down and did real and serious UI research on how to deal with having 100s of windows open at the same time, because my solution of having 32 virtual desktops can't be it.
I 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).<p>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.
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.
On the other end, as a user, I greatly prefer desktop apps, because I don't "lose" them as much. It's easy to lose a chat tab between lots of browser windows+tabs. A single IM window is harder to lose.<p>And then there's the integration: both look&feel and functionality can make a huge difference.
"Once they find their place in the Windows Start menu or the Mac OS Dock, they are always visible."<p>I don't think this is true anymore in Windows 8+. From my limited experience in using it, once you install something it disappears into a mass of icons and is never seen again. If you can remember the name you may be able to search for it.
I have just rediscovered the fantastic FreePascal/Lazarus, and have been thinking up desktop app projects to build. Cross-compile to Windows, Linux and OSX with native UI.
I'd like to hear a little more about how this "recent technology" that she linked to helps me deploy web apps to the desktop. The <a href="http://nwjs.io/" rel="nofollow">http://nwjs.io/</a> site certainly doesn't have much info on how it can help for this use case.
I've been using slack just fine in the browser, haven't had much of a need for a desktop version of it.<p>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.
Wow, there's a lot of hybrid hating here.<p>Consider this though:<p>• You have an app that doesn't need to perform actions in sub 10-milliseconds. 11 milliseconds is just fine.<p>• You don't require access to a whole host of system processes, but maybe access to the file system, or the clipboard, would be a big help to your users.<p>• Your users are not super technical and won't even know what a hybrid app or native app means.<p>• You want to get your app to market on multiple platforms in days/weeks, not months, and without spending a ton of money.<p>I think hybrid might be a good option there. Not the ultimate best ever piece of software ever I know, but compromises and all that.
A nice insight at the end of the article that I'd never realized (it might be obvious to you).<p>>as long as you browse the web, you keep coming back to google.com to navigate efficiently. This is why Google wants you to spend time in a browser. This is why they offer Gmail for free, Chrome for free, Chromebooks at a loss, or why they fund their own competition!
This approach is probably in complete contrast to what Flipkart/Myntra have been doing in India. Both are widely used e-commerce websites that are going complete mobile-app only by killing even their desktop and mobile websites.<p>Two moves in completely different directions. Would be interesting to see the results down the line.
I'd say it surely depends on what the "app" is supposed to do. I like to run Firefox natively rather than as a web app. On the other hand I'll be thrilled when the local tax office convert their Windows/MacOS software to a web app so that I can use it on Linux.
Slack, Spotify, Atom, React Native ... I think desktop/native apps implemented using web tech have come on leaps and bounds recently. They started off clunky, but are now starting to feel like native software imo.
I've been using Front since February and I love it. The desktop app was one of the key reasons I went with it because it is really fast compared to web interfaces of other apps I tried out.
There are many iOS apps that I wish had equivalent apps on OSX, but sadly they don't. Ones that come to mind are Netflix, HBO Go, Amazon Video, Amazon Music, etc.
Bad article title. Doesn't even attempt to show a statistical trend that they're 'coming back' (I would argue with the existence of app stores and the like that they never really left). <i>Does</i> talk about the authors experience of offering a desktop app which is very interesting.