HACKER Q&A
📣 vanilla-almond

Do you develop and support a native desktop app?


There have been recent discussions on HN about native desktop apps vs browser-based apps. The majority of apps posted and discussed here on HN seem to be cloud or browser-based apps and SaaS services.

Is anyone creating and selling native desktop apps? If so, what's kept you in the desktop apps space given the relentless march of browser-based SaaS apps?


  👤 bruce511 Accepted Answer ✓
I do both desktop and Web development. There are advantages and disadvantages to both platforms, just as there would be for discussions of native phone apps and Web apps.

On the support side we use Team Viewer a Lot - it has massively simplified doing support. I can watch a user do something, or teach them how to do it, or simply perform a task for them in a fraction of the time it used to take.

Probably the biggest reason we still have desktop apps in the mix is simply because of history. Some of our desktop apps contain code from 30 years ago (further if you include some C libraries.) this means the apps are very mature and thanks to our tools completely up to date in looks and functionality.

Our desktop users keep their data in-house, get faster performance, fewer "use the right browser" issues, and are immune to Internet outages. No hosting costs means it's also cheaper. Most of our desktop stuff is annual license now in line with the Web stuff.

We interface with local hardware (think IoT) and desktop is a lot simpler to install. We can also obviously connect outside to inside with the Web apps, but that takes more configuration effort at the router level.

We also have a Web offering of the same software, which is increasingly popular. It costs more to the client because of upstream costs (hosting, devops etc) but is popular (and even more so with work-from-home this year.) As infrastructure has improved (massive fibre rollout) so this has become a lot more practical.

There's still a huge market for desktop, but offerings already in the space are usually very mature and well known. Breaking into the space is hard now - there are established players. For new comers it's easier to build a Web app, and differentiate that way - especially for niche markets that may have mature desktop, but no Web offerings.


👤 fregonics
Performance, I work in a B2B company that helps small business management. Because of this nature of the clients, sometimes they will have old machines, and they don't feel the need to upgrade them. Our software must run even in a old Pentium 2GB machine, we only can do this with native development.

👤 jventura
I asked a similar question about 4 years ago [1], I’m also curious..

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11658873