Managing apps on the desktop is a pain. They get their dirty fingers everywhere and they're a pain to uninstall. For lightweight tasks, the web solved this, tho

Managing apps on the desktop is a pain. They get their dirty fingers everywhere and they're a pain to uninstall. For lightweight tasks, the web solved this, though local apps still ran smoother than webapps. App stores solved package management (so did Linux distros), and getting a true webapp to perform as well as a local app is more trouble than it's worth, and that's when you have a good network connection.