Believe me, the front end of web apps (and even the simple part of the backend, i.e. the parts without high scaling etc) are quite easy and high-level compared to the alternatives on the desktop.
I've done plenty of work on both sides and this is only true if you're developing the kind of app that looks and acts like a fancy web page.
You mean "the kind of web app" or "the kind of desktop app"? Native desktop apps are usually very tedious to develop, even with high-level tools like Visual Basic. Even for simple CRUD apps, the amount of layouting you need to do, input validation etc; all of those rote tasks are much more automated in web frameworks than they ever were in desktop development tools. The kind of things you can do with a few lines of jQuery in terms of UI manipulation are miles beyond what was even reasonably possible (meaning, wouldn't take weeks of work) in desktop applications.
Sure, CRUD apps should almost always be web apps. If you want a richer UI or need to do any serious local computation the web stack is a poor choice.
The entire reason I've gone back to native apps after 10+ years of web dev is that I find the kinds of apps well suited for the web to generally be very boring.
No, what I meant was - what side of the argument are you on, 'desktop apps are harder' or 'web apps are harder' ? ('harder' can be 'more difficult' or 'more tedious' - I'm not making any moral judgements here, my point was that web apps can be made faster and with less knowledge of details that nobody should really know in the first place).
I guess it depends on what desktop stack you're using. It's certainly far easier to toss together a CRUD app with Rails than it is with MFC. "4GL" environments like Powerbuilder make this pretty easy on the desktop too but people don't seem to use them much anymore.
It's certainly a lot easier to build a multi-user app as a web app.
I guess with this you're implying that writing web software is harder than writing desktop apps, and to that I say 'LOL'. Even when one restricts himself to one platform (the easiest to develop for when you make some sacrifices - Windows), it's still a lot more work to get a 'real' application developed there than on the web. You need to include the whole cycle - running on various versions of the OS, application installation and updates, data backup etc. Believe me, the front end of web apps (and even the simple part of the backend, i.e. the parts without high scaling etc) are quite easy and high-level compared to the alternatives on the desktop.