The thing is desktop apps are Dead, for multiple reasons:
- People don't trust anymore to install softwares on their computer, using them in the browser is safer
- There is no good cross-platform UI, so nearly everything is now a web app
- There is tons of good open-source softwares that you can self-host and use from anywhere instead of just one computer, also there is more expectations around sharing access to friends, coworkers, ...
Most of the softwares described in the article are for personal usage, I'm pretty sure you know a lot of the "self-hosted" apps from this list: https://elest.io/fully-managed-services
> People don't trust anymore to install softwares on their computer, using them in the browser is safer
I doubt users know the difference. We got here because OS vendors don't trust users to install software on their computer. What we really need are simple, solid sandboxing APIs to empower developers to ship secure software.
> There is no good cross-platform UI, so nearly everything is now a web app
Yep. I spent the last few days surveying the cross-platform GUI landscape. It really is pretty sad. Qt and wxWidgets seem super bloated, and the Qt company appears to be actively attempting to escape from their open source obligations[0].
I think there's hope on the horizon though. Flutter is pretty dang good, and the licensing story is much better than Qt. Also, there are several toolkits for Rust and Golang that are shaping up to be awesome. I think we might have a native GUI renaissance in 5 years or so.
> Yep. I spent the last few days surveying the cross-platform GUI landscape. It really is pretty sad. Qt and wxWidgets seem super bloated, and the Qt company appears to be actively attempting to escape from their open source obligations
If you're looking for a C++ solution -- judging from the mention of Qt and WxWidgets -- have you tried Ultimate++ (https://www.ultimatepp.org)? To me it seems much more compact than either of the two.
I doubt there will be a native GUI renaissance, look at the mac app store, it's not making a dent in the global direction and it's available since years. Ok it's only for a single platform, it's even worse on the windows app store!
I think there is no way back for desktop apps. Browser is the best sandbox available.
VM hypervisors are even better sandboxes. I don't imagine any browser will be more secure than for example a VirtualBox or VMWare VM, unless the browser itself literally is a VM hypervisor.
Obviously it would need to be made much more transparent to the end user, and integrated as a background technology. I am not suggesting that non-technical people should be trained to operate VMs, that's ridiculous.
Those 2 places aren't not the only places one gets software for either of those platforms, and are not really solid indicators of the popularity of desktop apps.
The Windows store especially isn't, because (as far as I understand) until somewhat recently, you were locked to only publishing UWP apps to it.
I completely disagree with the first two points. As to the last point, why do you need to follow anyone's expectations? Your data and personal servers are there to serve you first and foremost. If you want give people access, that's fine. I just don't see why you would feel obliged to do so.
- People don't trust anymore to install softwares on their computer, using them in the browser is safer
- There is no good cross-platform UI, so nearly everything is now a web app
- There is tons of good open-source softwares that you can self-host and use from anywhere instead of just one computer, also there is more expectations around sharing access to friends, coworkers, ...
Most of the softwares described in the article are for personal usage, I'm pretty sure you know a lot of the "self-hosted" apps from this list: https://elest.io/fully-managed-services