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Electron apps are still desktop apps. The web however did eat the desktop: everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app. I have literally

Electron apps are still desktop apps. The web however did eat the desktop: everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app. I have literally 4 apps that I use on my machine: terminal and postman in addition to the above. I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps

AussieWog93 5y ago
>I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps Harder to track people and feed them ads.
- xfer 5y ago
  No it isn't, even the govt apps in my country have ads in them. With firefox i can easily block them, for apps this becomes much harder, if dns blocking isn't sufficient.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    Yep, that's exactly what I was saying!
  - scns 5y ago
    What The Flying spaghetti monster?
- Razengan 5y ago
  > Harder to track people and feed them ads. In native apps, you mean?
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    It's not about whether they're native code or using a cross-platform API, but the fact that they're not web pages running in a browser. This allows them to "phone home" even when they're just running in the background, push notifications and bypass certain types of Adblocking (such as uBlock in Firefox). There is a good reason why so many websites push you to use the apps on mobile.
    - scns 5y ago
      On Android you can block every app with relatively fine grained control via TrackerControl [0]. Sometimes a little fiddly but worth it IMHO. You can download directly from the site, use the official client or use the much snappier Foxy Droid [1] that lacks features but i still recommend it. [0] https://f-droid.org/de/packages/net.kollnig.missioncontrol.fdroid/ https://f-droid.org/de/packages/net.kollnig.missioncontrol.f... [1] https://f-droid.org/de/packages/nya.kitsunyan.foxydroid/ https://f-droid.org/de/packages/nya.kitsunyan.foxydroid/
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  > Harder to track people and feed them ads. This is it. And it's really the app stores that make them so. On desktop, people are wary about installing programs, because they can pretty much do anything. So you can get people to visit your website who would never in a million years install your app on their PC. With app stores, people assume that apps are safe, because that's what they were promised. But then the apps are hoovering up all their personal information, even more than they get from a web page on a desktop. And the app stores that claim to be constraining bad behavior don't kick them out for it because huge social networks are some of the few companies with enough market power to divert their users to another phone platform.
  - pantulis 5y ago
    I dont think parent was refering to web as in "web sites you can open in Safari", but apps built with web technologies, as in Ionic or similar.
- blub 5y ago
  Your comment can be interpreted in two opposite ways, but it seems you meant that native apps allow the better tracking and ad delivery. While mobile apps are quite awful from this perspective, you must consider that the web is by far the most efficient platform for ad delivery and tracking. It's the web which has cookie pop-ups with dozens and dozens of companies that want to track you. It's the web which led to the development of ad blockers. It's the web where an app developer has full access to your data on their servers. It's the web where an app developer can at any time flip a switch and turn on telemetry, ads, etc.
linguae 5y ago
Two words: app stores. While this is less of a concern for Google (the Android supports alternative app stores, and Google would love it if we all used Chrome), switching to mobile apps will deprive Apple of a significant source of revenue derived from the App Store. Thus, it is in Apple's best interest for developers to continue writing iPhone/iPad apps and Apple receiving a chunk for each sale than for developers to write Web apps and Apple not receiving a cut.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Yup. This bears repeating. Desktop got conquered by web tech because OS vendors had no moat around third-party software. Smartphone OSes managed to create app stores before web technologies got to the point of competing with native, so mobile OS vendors have both leverage and strong business incentive to keep apps native to their platform.
irrational 5y ago
>I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps Apple has made it so that every browser on their mobile devices is basically really Safari under the hood. And they have purposefully crippled Safari to push developers to the lucrative app store. Nothing is going to change until this changes, either through consumer behavior or through legislation.
- Razengan 5y ago
  Web apps purposefully cripple mobile performance, battery life and accessibility. Nothing is going to change until this changes.
  - smackeyacky 5y ago
    Not to mention device level access like Bluetooth integration, making phone calls, using the camera etc. Mobile apps are hard to do as web apps if they are anything more complex than a front end for some web system.
- toastal 5y ago
  Yes. We had to do native because there are no Push Notifications on Safari mobile. I understand people hating the permission pop-ups on marketing-saturated blogs and other places that don't need it, but that's the whole purpose of a web app is to be more app-like and less static-website-like.
5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
>I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps One reason is we don't have unlimited energy sources on mobile devices. I am yet to see a non-trivial "web app" that can run fast without drawing kilowatts from the outlet.
esalman 5y ago
I use VScode for code and text editing (mostly Latex etc.) which is also Electron. Also, I don't really use mobile apps for most social media which have working mobile web pages.
speedgoose 5y ago
You don't have a lot web apps on mobile because the mobile web browsers provide a worse experience compared to native applications, unlike Electron or Chrome on Desktop that provides a much better experience in general (unless you have a 10 years old hardware with very little ram or are into old school GUI I know). The companies making web browsers and mobile operating systems are the same companies making native applications stores and requesting 30% of the revenue, so they don't have any good reason to make web applications better. They are not non profit.
- vmladenov 5y ago
  Electron’s user experience is atrocious even on recent hardware. It falls right into the uncanny valley of superficially appearing native and while not behaving natively.
  - gobookdev 5y ago
    VS Code is my fav piece of software of all time, it's an Electron app
    - jamil7 5y ago
      Agreed it’s an excellent editor however it has a lot of engineering resources behind it and still suffers from sluggish performance, especially on startup.
      - speedgoose 5y ago
        It starts quickly on my laptops. What kind of hardware do you use ?
        jamil7 5y ago
        Both an Intel and an M1 mac, it's especially noticeable on the newer machine as native apps open instantly, even Xcode, which is a pig seems to open quicker. Like I said it's a great editor and I use it when I need to do some Python or JS work (remote/ssh development functionality is especially nice) but I don't think it's immune from the resource argument against electron.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app video editing, DAWs, music notation, CAD/CAM, 3D modelling (think Blender), compilers, linkers, IDE's other than VSCode, local photo management, media players, messaging services (telegram etc), device management ... these and many more called and laughed at your claim.
- tephra 5y ago
  IIRC you can use fusion 360 in the browser now? WhatsApp is of course available on the web. I'm a regular user of play.spotify.com, works great. Figma is a great design tool available only on the web. I do get your point, but there are more and more things moving to the web as more and more standards are being published (if you think this is a good idea is another discussion). Modern html and CSS is by far the least complex GUI framework I've used. And it is (somewhat) cross platform.
  - bsenftner 5y ago
    Wow, if modern html and CSS is the least complex GUI framework you've used, you need some exposure. That combo is uber-complex, and the tool sets are college degrees all by themselves. It is a flat out joke how the developers of today have added complexity everywhere they could.
CodeArtisan 5y ago
An electron app is not necessary SaaS but it is still a hidden web browser running an application built on web technologies (Essentially HTML5 which is html+css+javascript).
mlang23 5y ago
Most web apps are an accessibility disaster compared to their native counterparts. I guess that is not the main blocking factor, but not being native has subtle disadvantages all over the place. I remember there was actually a time where web apps were a trend, but most vendors stopped doing that since they just couldn't provide a really smooth user experience.
lewisjoe 5y ago
> I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps Simple equation. Efficiency of a mobile device is directly proportional to the efficiency of the runtime the apps are running on. For example Objective-C / swift has a GC-less memory model which just means we get to do more with less memory. This is how iPhone typically ship with lesser RAM than Android phones, yet do everything that Android phones are capable of surprisingly well. Desktops/Laptops have no need to worry about extreme memory efficiency. They are always/usually connected to a power outlet. But mobile platforms on the other hand need extreme memory efficiency to get by with battery power. If you do the math, the abstractions that the web provides comes with a huge cost. A virtual rendering engine, a programming runtime that is notorious for bad memory management and all this on top of a huge VM called the browser. It doesn't scale.
- EvilEy3 5y ago
  > For example Objective-C / swift has a GC-less memory model which just means we get to do more with less memory. This is how iPhone typically ship with lesser RAM than Android phones, yet do everything that Android phones are capable of surprisingly well. You forgot CPU that's light-years ahead of anything that Qualcomm or Samsung have. But, please, keep thinking that it is about Swift/Objective-C, lol.
  - jamil7 5y ago
    The parent's point still stands. Memory usage is lower without the overhead of the JVM (I think that's the point they were making).
    - EvilEy3 5y ago
      There's no JVM on Android.
      - jamil7 5y ago
        You're right of course, ART.
nineteen999 5y ago
> everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app. The media creation community is looks at the web programming community and wondering what the hell you are talking about, and why your view is so narrow. Blender, ZBrush, Unreal Engine, Visual Studio, ProTools, Reaper, Substance Suite etc. etc. the list goes on and on. These kind of applications often have extremely heavy system requirements and are often extremely sensitive to latency, and are just not going up and "migrate to the cloud" anytime soon. Embedded programming is another example. A lot of developers work in this space. > I have literally 4 apps that I use on my machine: terminal and postman in addition to the above. Your personal requirements, as lightweight and easily offloadable as they are, do not represent the wider community. I am constantly astounded by how blinkered the web community appears to be about this.
- evilos 5y ago
  Visual effects artists and embedded programmers are very niche communities (former embedded SW engineer here). Probably something like 90% of people just need a browser 90% of the time. It's kind of a no brainer from a business point of view. If your app can be browser based and still functional, it should be. Of course there are drawbacks but the economics are in the browser's favor.
  - nineteen999 5y ago
    > If your app can be browser based and still functional, it should be. We can choose to disagree on this point, however... >> everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app It is a long way from the parent's comment (above) to "if your app can be browser based and still functional, it should be". Maybe it should, maybe it shouldn't, but that doesn't contradict my point that the parent is incorrect in that "everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app". You're arguing a different thing. There are plenty of apps, as I described above, that don't have functional web-based equivalents, and probably will not for a very long time to come. There are enough niche industries with such requirements that combined, they will act as a counterweight to the push for everything to run as a web app for quite some time.
  - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Semaphor 5y ago
Music player, video player, password manager, messenger, IDEs, Nextcloud Sync, phrase replacer, search, file explorer, 7-zip, backups, REPL, budgeting, office suite, texteditor and terminal. And those are just the non-electron, non-web-frontend apps I regularly use, and still excludes games.
WA 5y ago
> I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps There are many Cordova/Capacitor-based web apps in a Webview shell with access to native APIs.
lenkite 5y ago
> I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps Isn't this obvious - the web is deliberately crippled on mobile platforms like iOS.

AussieWog93 5y ago

>I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps Harder to track people and feed them ads.

xfer 5y ago
No it isn't, even the govt apps in my country have ads in them. With firefox i can easily block them, for apps this becomes much harder, if dns blocking isn't sufficient.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  Yep, that's exactly what I was saying!
- scns 5y ago
  What The Flying spaghetti monster?
Razengan 5y ago
> Harder to track people and feed them ads. In native apps, you mean?
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  It's not about whether they're native code or using a cross-platform API, but the fact that they're not web pages running in a browser. This allows them to "phone home" even when they're just running in the background, push notifications and bypass certain types of Adblocking (such as uBlock in Firefox). There is a good reason why so many websites push you to use the apps on mobile.
  - scns 5y ago
    On Android you can block every app with relatively fine grained control via TrackerControl [0]. Sometimes a little fiddly but worth it IMHO. You can download directly from the site, use the official client or use the much snappier Foxy Droid [1] that lacks features but i still recommend it. [0] https://f-droid.org/de/packages/net.kollnig.missioncontrol.fdroid/ https://f-droid.org/de/packages/net.kollnig.missioncontrol.f... [1] https://f-droid.org/de/packages/nya.kitsunyan.foxydroid/ https://f-droid.org/de/packages/nya.kitsunyan.foxydroid/
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> Harder to track people and feed them ads. This is it. And it's really the app stores that make them so. On desktop, people are wary about installing programs, because they can pretty much do anything. So you can get people to visit your website who would never in a million years install your app on their PC. With app stores, people assume that apps are safe, because that's what they were promised. But then the apps are hoovering up all their personal information, even more than they get from a web page on a desktop. And the app stores that claim to be constraining bad behavior don't kick them out for it because huge social networks are some of the few companies with enough market power to divert their users to another phone platform.
- pantulis 5y ago
  I dont think parent was refering to web as in "web sites you can open in Safari", but apps built with web technologies, as in Ionic or similar.
blub 5y ago
Your comment can be interpreted in two opposite ways, but it seems you meant that native apps allow the better tracking and ad delivery. While mobile apps are quite awful from this perspective, you must consider that the web is by far the most efficient platform for ad delivery and tracking. It's the web which has cookie pop-ups with dozens and dozens of companies that want to track you. It's the web which led to the development of ad blockers. It's the web where an app developer has full access to your data on their servers. It's the web where an app developer can at any time flip a switch and turn on telemetry, ads, etc.

linguae 5y ago

Two words: app stores. While this is less of a concern for Google (the Android supports alternative app stores, and Google would love it if we all used Chrome), switching to mobile apps will deprive Apple of a significant source of revenue derived from the App Store. Thus, it is in Apple's best interest for developers to continue writing iPhone/iPad apps and Apple receiving a chunk for each sale than for developers to write Web apps and Apple not receiving a cut.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
Yup. This bears repeating. Desktop got conquered by web tech because OS vendors had no moat around third-party software. Smartphone OSes managed to create app stores before web technologies got to the point of competing with native, so mobile OS vendors have both leverage and strong business incentive to keep apps native to their platform.

irrational 5y ago

>I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps Apple has made it so that every browser on their mobile devices is basically really Safari under the hood. And they have purposefully crippled Safari to push developers to the lucrative app store. Nothing is going to change until this changes, either through consumer behavior or through legislation.

Razengan 5y ago
Web apps purposefully cripple mobile performance, battery life and accessibility. Nothing is going to change until this changes.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  Not to mention device level access like Bluetooth integration, making phone calls, using the camera etc. Mobile apps are hard to do as web apps if they are anything more complex than a front end for some web system.
toastal 5y ago
Yes. We had to do native because there are no Push Notifications on Safari mobile. I understand people hating the permission pop-ups on marketing-saturated blogs and other places that don't need it, but that's the whole purpose of a web app is to be more app-like and less static-website-like.

5e92cb50239222b 5y ago

>I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps One reason is we don't have unlimited energy sources on mobile devices. I am yet to see a non-trivial "web app" that can run fast without drawing kilowatts from the outlet.

esalman 5y ago

I use VScode for code and text editing (mostly Latex etc.) which is also Electron. Also, I don't really use mobile apps for most social media which have working mobile web pages.

speedgoose 5y ago

You don't have a lot web apps on mobile because the mobile web browsers provide a worse experience compared to native applications, unlike Electron or Chrome on Desktop that provides a much better experience in general (unless you have a 10 years old hardware with very little ram or are into old school GUI I know). The companies making web browsers and mobile operating systems are the same companies making native applications stores and requesting 30% of the revenue, so they don't have any good reason to make web applications better. They are not non profit.

vmladenov 5y ago
Electron’s user experience is atrocious even on recent hardware. It falls right into the uncanny valley of superficially appearing native and while not behaving natively.
- gobookdev 5y ago
  VS Code is my fav piece of software of all time, it's an Electron app
  - jamil7 5y ago
    Agreed it’s an excellent editor however it has a lot of engineering resources behind it and still suffers from sluggish performance, especially on startup.
    - speedgoose 5y ago
      It starts quickly on my laptops. What kind of hardware do you use ?
      - jamil7 5y ago
        Both an Intel and an M1 mac, it's especially noticeable on the newer machine as native apps open instantly, even Xcode, which is a pig seems to open quicker. Like I said it's a great editor and I use it when I need to do some Python or JS work (remote/ssh development functionality is especially nice) but I don't think it's immune from the resource argument against electron.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

> everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app video editing, DAWs, music notation, CAD/CAM, 3D modelling (think Blender), compilers, linkers, IDE's other than VSCode, local photo management, media players, messaging services (telegram etc), device management ... these and many more called and laughed at your claim.

tephra 5y ago
IIRC you can use fusion 360 in the browser now? WhatsApp is of course available on the web. I'm a regular user of play.spotify.com, works great. Figma is a great design tool available only on the web. I do get your point, but there are more and more things moving to the web as more and more standards are being published (if you think this is a good idea is another discussion). Modern html and CSS is by far the least complex GUI framework I've used. And it is (somewhat) cross platform.
- bsenftner 5y ago
  Wow, if modern html and CSS is the least complex GUI framework you've used, you need some exposure. That combo is uber-complex, and the tool sets are college degrees all by themselves. It is a flat out joke how the developers of today have added complexity everywhere they could.

CodeArtisan 5y ago

An electron app is not necessary SaaS but it is still a hidden web browser running an application built on web technologies (Essentially HTML5 which is html+css+javascript).

mlang23 5y ago

Most web apps are an accessibility disaster compared to their native counterparts. I guess that is not the main blocking factor, but not being native has subtle disadvantages all over the place. I remember there was actually a time where web apps were a trend, but most vendors stopped doing that since they just couldn't provide a really smooth user experience.

lewisjoe 5y ago

> I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps Simple equation. Efficiency of a mobile device is directly proportional to the efficiency of the runtime the apps are running on. For example Objective-C / swift has a GC-less memory model which just means we get to do more with less memory. This is how iPhone typically ship with lesser RAM than Android phones, yet do everything that Android phones are capable of surprisingly well. Desktops/Laptops have no need to worry about extreme memory efficiency. They are always/usually connected to a power outlet. But mobile platforms on the other hand need extreme memory efficiency to get by with battery power. If you do the math, the abstractions that the web provides comes with a huge cost. A virtual rendering engine, a programming runtime that is notorious for bad memory management and all this on top of a huge VM called the browser. It doesn't scale.

EvilEy3 5y ago
> For example Objective-C / swift has a GC-less memory model which just means we get to do more with less memory. This is how iPhone typically ship with lesser RAM than Android phones, yet do everything that Android phones are capable of surprisingly well. You forgot CPU that's light-years ahead of anything that Qualcomm or Samsung have. But, please, keep thinking that it is about Swift/Objective-C, lol.
- jamil7 5y ago
  The parent's point still stands. Memory usage is lower without the overhead of the JVM (I think that's the point they were making).
  - EvilEy3 5y ago
    There's no JVM on Android.
    - jamil7 5y ago
      You're right of course, ART.

nineteen999 5y ago

> everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app. The media creation community is looks at the web programming community and wondering what the hell you are talking about, and why your view is so narrow. Blender, ZBrush, Unreal Engine, Visual Studio, ProTools, Reaper, Substance Suite etc. etc. the list goes on and on. These kind of applications often have extremely heavy system requirements and are often extremely sensitive to latency, and are just not going up and "migrate to the cloud" anytime soon. Embedded programming is another example. A lot of developers work in this space. > I have literally 4 apps that I use on my machine: terminal and postman in addition to the above. Your personal requirements, as lightweight and easily offloadable as they are, do not represent the wider community. I am constantly astounded by how blinkered the web community appears to be about this.

evilos 5y ago
Visual effects artists and embedded programmers are very niche communities (former embedded SW engineer here). Probably something like 90% of people just need a browser 90% of the time. It's kind of a no brainer from a business point of view. If your app can be browser based and still functional, it should be. Of course there are drawbacks but the economics are in the browser's favor.
- nineteen999 5y ago
  > If your app can be browser based and still functional, it should be. We can choose to disagree on this point, however... >> everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app It is a long way from the parent's comment (above) to "if your app can be browser based and still functional, it should be". Maybe it should, maybe it shouldn't, but that doesn't contradict my point that the parent is incorrect in that "everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app". You're arguing a different thing. There are plenty of apps, as I described above, that don't have functional web-based equivalents, and probably will not for a very long time to come. There are enough niche industries with such requirements that combined, they will act as a counterweight to the push for everything to run as a web app for quite some time.
- 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Semaphor 5y ago

Music player, video player, password manager, messenger, IDEs, Nextcloud Sync, phrase replacer, search, file explorer, 7-zip, backups, REPL, budgeting, office suite, texteditor and terminal. And those are just the non-electron, non-web-frontend apps I regularly use, and still excludes games.

WA 5y ago

> I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps There are many Cordova/Capacitor-based web apps in a Webview shell with access to native APIs.

lenkite 5y ago

> I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps Isn't this obvious - the web is deliberately crippled on mobile platforms like iOS.