Debunking desktop apps - why native desktop apps are dead (for the most part)

For decades, desktop applications dominated computing landscapes, offering specialized email, messaging, and graphic editing tools. Then along came modern web technologies—advanced JavaScript frameworks, powerful browser APIs, and single-page application architectures like React—which have fundamentally transformed application development, challenging the traditional desktop app paradigm with near-native performance and cross-platform accessibility.

People (and businesses) think they need desktop apps because of the lingering perception that web apps are archaic, slow, and disconnected. However, modern browsers have evolved from mere web portals to comprehensive application platforms, blurring the traditional boundaries between desktop and web experiences.

Consider the case study on our product, brainful. We are publishing a comprehensive benchmark report comparing web and desktop clients across multiple competitors. Early testing reveals quantitative performance metrics: brainful's web client is 23% faster in document load time than Google Docs and 33% faster than Microsoft Word. Notably, Microsoft's desktop client underperformed its web counterpart by over 30%, challenging traditional assumptions about native application performance.

What is particularly inefficient is the recent proliferation of web application desktop wrappers. These wrappers provide a pseudo-native experience that fundamentally lacks true native performance and integration, merely offering an illusion of desktop nativity to satisfy user familiarity. The reality is that unless your software needs to deal with large volumes of data (gigabytes and beyond) with high throughput, e.g., video editing, you do not need a dedicated client.

At brainpolo, we are banking on a future where browsers will become increasingly powerful, compute resources will become more cost-effective, and network bandwidth will continue to speed up.

Whilst there is the elephant in the room—running a server model is expensive, and you cannot escape recurring server compute and bandwidth costs; if you value development time and, more importantly, are serious about protecting IP, there is no way to justify business logic running client-side.