It can work. I have spent several years of my life making it work :) Obviously, on mobile you have app stores including enterprise app stores. On desktop you d

It can work. I have spent several years of my life making it work :) Obviously, on mobile you have app stores including enterprise app stores. On desktop you don't, or you do but they suck so people often don't want to use them. Making shipping desktop apps as easily as you can ship a web app is the goal of my company [1] and although it's always a work in progress it does get very close to that goal now. In particular: - Once set up you can deploy with a single command that builds, signs, integrates auto update engines, renders icons, uploads and everything else. It's not harder than uploading a new version of a web app. - Apps can do synchronous update checks on startup, web style, so once you push a new version everyone will get that version when they next start up the app. You can easily implement version checks whilst the app runs to remind users to restart after a while (big SPAs have the same issue if the server changes whilst user's tabs are still open). - Apps can update in the background too. - Delta updates make update times very low once the initial install is done. - On Windows, apps from different vendors can share files. So if two apps share a runtime and it's stable enough that files don't change totally from version to version, the user won't have to download them. Unfortunately on other platforms this nice trick doesn't work, and in a world where runtimes update every few weeks it's of less value. But still. All this works behind the firewall, also. [1] https://hydraulic.dev/ https://hydraulic.dev/