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

For a long time, we would have a dedicated desktop app for everything, from email clients to messaging apps to graphic editors. Then along came newer versions of JavaScript and more powerful web APIs. More potent browsers, and the rise of the single page application, shoved to the forefront by Meta’s React project, has largely made desktop apps redundant.

A major reason why people (and businesses) think they need one is that we have this preconceived notion that web apps are archaic, slow, and more distant from the user. Yet, browsers are no longer just a portal to the world, they have become the home of the internet.

Consider the case study on our product brainful. We did a thorough performance benchmark (create) on all major competitors web and desktop clients, and results showed, that brainful is the fastest by document load time by 23% for a single document against Google Docs, and 33% faster than Microsoft Word.

What is more absurd is the recent rise of web application client desktop wrappers. There is no reason for this to exist, other than the familiarity of a native desktop experience for a wider audience that is not native at all.

At brainpolo, and its products such as brainful, are banking on the future that browsers will become more powerful, compute will become cheaper, and network bandwidth will get faster.

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.

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