What future for native desktop apps?

Question

Is the native desktop app in danger of extinction?A whole category of desktop apps, call it the "office productivity" category, appears to have been swallowed whole by the SaaS model (Software as a Service).Some apps are still rooted in the desktop space: graphics, animation and video. Yet even here, browser-based SaaS apps are making inroads. For example, Figma is hugely popular - prompting their Mac-only desktop rival Sketch to publish a blog post extolling the benefits of native apps [1][2].If there is a future for desktop apps, it looks increasingly to be based on Electron. A technology that is arguably not nimble, light or performant.Given the unstoppable juggernaut that is SaaS, is there still space for native desktop apps? If you're a business, is SaaS always more appealing?Are there any developers who still find the prospect of developing a native desktop app more appealing than the SaaS route?If you are developing a native desktop app, already support one, or simply prefer using native over cloud, how do you see the future of desktop apps?[1] Sketch: Why we&rsquo;re proud to build a truly native Mac app https://www.sketch.com/blog/2020/10/26/part-of-your-world-why-we-re-proud-to-build-a-truly-native-mac-app/[2] HN discussion of Sketch post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24899391

PaulHoule · Accepted Answer

Adobe's "Creative Cloud" has monthly billing like a SaaS but it is mostly the same desktop product is always been with some exceptions such as the new Lightroom (maybe a web-first photo editor is appropriate if they want to compete with the immediacy of social media) or the mobile editions of Acrobat. (e.g. for heavy document conversion a phone should hand the work off to a cloud PC somewhere... not just for "resources" such as memory and CPU but also hosting the whole ecosystem to run a real copy of Microsoft Word to convert a Word to a PDF.)
For little projects though (say an app to control my "smart home" during a party) I progress through "as much as I can do with a web app" (a lot) directly to Electron through MobX + React.
You might say "that sux" but I looked hard at the cross-platform GUI toolkits like Tk, GTK, Qt, PyGame, Kivy, JavaFX, and none of them have a good story.
I guess I could learn to make native Windows or MacOS X applications, but I've gone about 20 years not learning how because the market for cross-platform software (web sites...) has kept me busy.

maxrev17 · Answer

An interesting question and one that's been running around my head for a while. Out of interest this looks quite good: https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2021/02/17/net-6-p...

AnimalMuppet · Answer

You see SaaS as unstoppable, but it's not. It's just a trend, nothing more.Desktop apps solve a problem: I can still work, even if the network/server is down. SaaS solves a different problem: I can't mess up and lose my data. So desktop apps make sense whenever you're more concerned about the first problem than the second.

unearth3d · Answer

With the increasing failure of saas, internet reliability, and large file sizes my only saas is for accommodating - actively avoid all other saas. My work is with large raster and vector files.