> everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app.

The media creation community is looks at the web programming community and wondering what the hell you are talking about, and why your view is so narrow.

Blender, ZBrush, Unreal Engine, Visual Studio, ProTools, Reaper, Substance Suite etc. etc. the list goes on and on. These kind of applications often have extremely heavy system requirements and are often extremely sensitive to latency, and are just not going up and "migrate to the cloud" anytime soon.

Embedded programming is another example. A lot of developers work in this space.

> I have literally 4 apps that I use on my machine: terminal and postman in addition to the above.

Your personal requirements, as lightweight and easily offloadable as they are, do not represent the wider community. I am constantly astounded by how blinkered the web community appears to be about this.

Visual effects artists and embedded programmers are very niche communities (former embedded SW engineer here). Probably something like 90% of people just need a browser 90% of the time. It's kind of a no brainer from a business point of view. If your app can be browser based and still functional, it should be. Of course there are drawbacks but the economics are in the browser's favor.

> If your app can be browser based and still functional, it should be.

We can choose to disagree on this point, however...

>> everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app

It is a long way from the parent's comment (above) to "if your app can be browser based and still functional, it should be".

Maybe it should, maybe it shouldn't, but that doesn't contradict my point that the parent is incorrect in that "everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app". You're arguing a different thing.

There are plenty of apps, as I described above, that don't have functional web-based equivalents, and probably will not for a very long time to come. There are enough niche industries with such requirements that combined, they will act as a counterweight to the push for everything to run as a web app for quite some time.

"If your app can be browser based and still functional, it should be. Of course there are drawbacks but the economics are in the browser's favor"

This right here is the reason there are many browser-based apps - it's really convenient for the company, damn the users. The company can do whatever they want, whenever they want and have full access to both telemetry and user data.

> everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app

video editing, DAWs, music notation, CAD/CAM, 3D modelling (think Blender), compilers, linkers, IDE's other than VSCode, local photo management, media players, messaging services (telegram etc), device management ... these and many more called and laughed at your claim.

IIRC you can use fusion 360 in the browser now?

WhatsApp is of course available on the web. I'm a regular user of play.spotify.com, works great. Figma is a great design tool available only on the web.

I do get your point, but there are more and more things moving to the web as more and more standards are being published (if you think this is a good idea is another discussion).

Modern html and CSS is by far the least complex GUI framework I've used. And it is (somewhat) cross platform.

Wow, if modern html and CSS is the least complex GUI framework you've used, you need some exposure. That combo is uber-complex, and the tool sets are college degrees all by themselves. It is a flat out joke how the developers of today have added complexity everywhere they could.

>I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps

Apple has made it so that every browser on their mobile devices is basically really Safari under the hood. And they have purposefully crippled Safari to push developers to the lucrative app store. Nothing is going to change until this changes, either through consumer behavior or through legislation.

Yes. We had to do native because there are no Push Notifications on Safari mobile. I understand people hating the permission pop-ups on marketing-saturated blogs and other places that don't need it, but that's the whole purpose of a web app is to be more app-like and less static-website-like.

Web apps purposefully cripple mobile performance, battery life and accessibility. Nothing is going to change until this changes.

Not to mention device level access like Bluetooth integration, making phone calls, using the camera etc. Mobile apps are hard to do as web apps if they are anything more complex than a front end for some web system.

>I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps

One reason is we don't have unlimited energy sources on mobile devices. I am yet to see a non-trivial "web app" that can run fast without drawing kilowatts from the outlet.

You don't have a lot web apps on mobile because the mobile web browsers provide a worse experience compared to native applications, unlike Electron or Chrome on Desktop that provides a much better experience in general (unless you have a 10 years old hardware with very little ram or are into old school GUI I know).

The companies making web browsers and mobile operating systems are the same companies making native applications stores and requesting 30% of the revenue, so they don't have any good reason to make web applications better. They are not non profit.

> mobile web browsers provide a worse experience compared to native applications, unlike Electron or Chrome on Desktop that provides a much better experience in general

Electron apps are perhaps faster and cheaper to make than native desktop GUI apps for most organizations because they already have Web developers, but I've never heard anyone claim they're "better" than native, if that's what you're saying. Do you mean they're somehow better for the end user? If so, how?

Better compatibility. I have a machine that still runs Windows 7; and electron apps rarely have issues. Many native apps no longer work on my OS.

Malware's backwards compatible with Windows 7. In fact it gets better and better the more time passes.

Yes I was more thinking about development. Faster and cheaper development is the key. Development teams can focus more on the user experience and the features.

You also get a good application on all platforms, GNU/Linux, Windows, and Mac which is nice and used to not be the case.

Electron’s user experience is atrocious even on recent hardware. It falls right into the uncanny valley of superficially appearing native and while not behaving natively.

VS Code is my fav piece of software of all time, it's an Electron app

VS Code is the most frustrating piece of software I use, because it is very good, but it's UX is terrible because they refuse to make any allowances for native platform standards.

I don't use it enough to have any of the hotkeys that aren't bog-standard memorized, and the refusal to add menu options or toolbar buttons makes discoverability really bad.

Agreed it’s an excellent editor however it has a lot of engineering resources behind it and still suffers from sluggish performance, especially on startup.

It starts quickly on my laptops. What kind of hardware do you use ?

Both an Intel and an M1 mac, it's especially noticeable on the newer machine as native apps open instantly, even Xcode, which is a pig seems to open quicker. Like I said it's a great editor and I use it when I need to do some Python or JS work (remote/ssh development functionality is especially nice) but I don't think it's immune from the resource argument against electron.

VS Code is so sluggish that I’ve found myself spending more and more time in vim when Sublime Text isn’t an option.

Most web apps are an accessibility disaster compared to their native counterparts. I guess that is not the main blocking factor, but not being native has subtle disadvantages all over the place. I remember there was actually a time where web apps were a trend, but most vendors stopped doing that since they just couldn't provide a really smooth user experience.

>I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps

Harder to track people and feed them ads.

> Harder to track people and feed them ads.

This is it. And it's really the app stores that make them so.

On desktop, people are wary about installing programs, because they can pretty much do anything. So you can get people to visit your website who would never in a million years install your app on their PC.

With app stores, people assume that apps are safe, because that's what they were promised. But then the apps are hoovering up all their personal information, even more than they get from a web page on a desktop. And the app stores that claim to be constraining bad behavior don't kick them out for it because huge social networks are some of the few companies with enough market power to divert their users to another phone platform.

I dont think parent was refering to web as in "web sites you can open in Safari", but apps built with web technologies, as in Ionic or similar.

Your comment can be interpreted in two opposite ways, but it seems you meant that native apps allow the better tracking and ad delivery.

While mobile apps are quite awful from this perspective, you must consider that the web is by far the most efficient platform for ad delivery and tracking.

It's the web which has cookie pop-ups with dozens and dozens of companies that want to track you.

It's the web which led to the development of ad blockers.

It's the web where an app developer has full access to your data on their servers.

It's the web where an app developer can at any time flip a switch and turn on telemetry, ads, etc.

No it isn't, even the govt apps in my country have ads in them. With firefox i can easily block them, for apps this becomes much harder, if dns blocking isn't sufficient.

Yep, that's exactly what I was saying!

What The Flying spaghetti monster?

> Harder to track people and feed them ads.

In native apps, you mean?

It's not about whether they're native code or using a cross-platform API, but the fact that they're not web pages running in a browser. This allows them to "phone home" even when they're just running in the background, push notifications and bypass certain types of Adblocking (such as uBlock in Firefox).

There is a good reason why so many websites push you to use the apps on mobile.

On Android you can block every app with relatively fine grained control via TrackerControl [0]. Sometimes a little fiddly but worth it IMHO. You can download directly from the site, use the official client or use the much snappier Foxy Droid [1] that lacks features but i still recommend it.

[0] https://f-droid.org/de/packages/net.kollnig.missioncontrol.f...

[1] https://f-droid.org/de/packages/nya.kitsunyan.foxydroid/

Music player, video player, password manager, messenger, IDEs, Nextcloud Sync, phrase replacer, search, file explorer, 7-zip, backups, REPL, budgeting, office suite, texteditor and terminal.

And those are just the non-electron, non-web-frontend apps I regularly use, and still excludes games.

Two words: app stores.

While this is less of a concern for Google (the Android supports alternative app stores, and Google would love it if we all used Chrome), switching to mobile apps will deprive Apple of a significant source of revenue derived from the App Store. Thus, it is in Apple's best interest for developers to continue writing iPhone/iPad apps and Apple receiving a chunk for each sale than for developers to write Web apps and Apple not receiving a cut.

Yup. This bears repeating. Desktop got conquered by web tech because OS vendors had no moat around third-party software. Smartphone OSes managed to create app stores before web technologies got to the point of competing with native, so mobile OS vendors have both leverage and strong business incentive to keep apps native to their platform.

> I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps

Simple equation. Efficiency of a mobile device is directly proportional to the efficiency of the runtime the apps are running on. For example Objective-C / swift has a GC-less memory model which just means we get to do more with less memory. This is how iPhone typically ship with lesser RAM than Android phones, yet do everything that Android phones are capable of surprisingly well.

Desktops/Laptops have no need to worry about extreme memory efficiency. They are always/usually connected to a power outlet. But mobile platforms on the other hand need extreme memory efficiency to get by with battery power.

If you do the math, the abstractions that the web provides comes with a huge cost. A virtual rendering engine, a programming runtime that is notorious for bad memory management and all this on top of a huge VM called the browser. It doesn't scale.

> For example Objective-C / swift has a GC-less memory model which just means we get to do more with less memory. This is how iPhone typically ship with lesser RAM than Android phones, yet do everything that Android phones are capable of surprisingly well.

You forgot CPU that's light-years ahead of anything that Qualcomm or Samsung have. But, please, keep thinking that it is about Swift/Objective-C, lol.

The parent's point still stands. Memory usage is lower without the overhead of the JVM (I think that's the point they were making).

There's no JVM on Android.

You're right of course, ART.

> You forgot CPU that's light-years ahead of anything that Qualcomm or Samsung have

That's a relatively recent development.

iOS's lower memory usage compared to Android, however, has been forever.

> That's a relatively recent development.

No, it's not. Apple been dominating mobile since a5.

I said relatively.

Relative to inception of iOS and Android, which is since when iPhones has got away with shipping less RAM compared to Android flagships.

> I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps

Isn't this obvious - the web is deliberately crippled on mobile platforms like iOS.

An electron app is not necessary SaaS but it is still a hidden web browser running an application built on web technologies (Essentially HTML5 which is html+css+javascript).

> I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps

There are many Cordova/Capacitor-based web apps in a Webview shell with access to native APIs.

I use VScode for code and text editing (mostly Latex etc.) which is also Electron.

Also, I don't really use mobile apps for most social media which have working mobile web pages.