When you start building an app that does anything more than what a typical website does – basic stuff like keeping some persistent files, drag and drop, notifications, minimize to tray, using threads, the html5 apis are widely insufficient, performs poorly or – in the case of webrtc –massively over-complicated). They’re (rightfully) designed for the browser with its ephemeral untrusted model.

It’s a shame, because cross platform app building, distribution and updates is a shitshow, even with electron, putting extra labor on the developers.

That said, some apps should really be web apps, but are still bundled as desktop apps purely for frameless “premium” experience. It would be great if there was better browser support for allowing users to “install” web apps, but right now it’s pretty bad.