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I'm done making desktop applications (2009)
- Animats 5mo agoFrom the article: "for the last three years I’ve sold Bingo Card Creator. That's a job for a web page. It doesn't need to be installed.
- speleding 5mo agoI agree, but this app was created in 2006. That's when IE6 was still roaming the earth. Might have been easier to get it to work as an app.
- ksherlock 5mo ago[2009]
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- DatumPlus 5mo ago[dead]
- recrush 5mo agowhich circle are we in?
- josefritzishere 5mo agoCondemned to useless labor, I beleive that's the 4th circle.
- taude 5mo agofeels more like 8, living in times of mass-fraud.
- sudb 5mo agoI wonder what the numbers say about desktop applications now, and how much the arrival of Electron changed things up here. Nowadays, it seems to be that mobile apps have the "best metrics" for b2c software. I'd be interested to read a contemporary version of this article.
- yshamrei 5mo agoIn 2026, the number of mobile applications in the App Store and Google Play increased by 60% year over year, largely because entry into the market has become much easier thanks to AI.
- hermitcrab 5mo agoSome of us are still making a living from desktop apps, 17 years later.
- xantronix 5mo agoPlease tell your tales. We beseech thee of thine humble wisdom.
- hermitcrab 5mo agoI've written about it lots at: https://www.successfulsoftware.net https://www.successfulsoftware.net
- hermitcrab 5mo agoWhat 'best metrics'?
- yshamrei 5mo agoI would like to go back to 2009 =) The world was definitely simpler, and Bitcoin was cheaper =)
- QuantumNomad_ 5mo agoPlease pick up a few bitcoins for me too when you go there
- xp84 5mo agoRealizing I could frickin mine enough bitcoins overnight back then to probably be set for life (maybe for multiple generations) now, is one of my biggest life regrets. I assume it’s shared with all other people who were into tech back then but dismissed bitcoin as stupid, as I did.
- werdnapk 5mo agoYou simply can't get hung up on what could have been. Same applies to trying to time the stock market... should have bought, should have sold. Best thing is to know there's nothing that can be done about the past and move along and deal with what you can do now instead.
- xp84 5mo agoYou're right. What gets me though is that unlike the stock market, bitcoin was an incredibly rare occurrence where anyone could have gotten extraordinarily rich without even incurring any risk! (besides a couple evenings spent learning how to use it.) Whereas to have $10MM today in GOOG stock, I would have had to invest over $300k in 2010.
- ux266478 5mo ago> without even incurring any risk! That's not true at all, any number of things could have killed bitcoin in its infancy. The stakes were just low. Somewhere out there is a lost collection of wallets of mine, collectively holding ~100btc ($1000 at the time). If regulators cracked down hard, that 100btc would have become just as worthless and either way I'd be out $1000. "Risk" is an epistemic claim about the future taking the worse path. Obviously looking back it looks like risk-free money. That's not how it looked at the time. The "currency of the future" thing was always niche, especially after the crash in 2013, until a much larger cultural shift happened around 2015-ish. Plenty of people will chime in with early bitcoin stories, and how they always believed it was going to go to the moon, etc. I always find it curious because my memory of the time period is that it was a means to an end, and that's how the overwhelming majority saw it and treated it. Funnily enough, it was thanks to that overwhelming majority that led to it being worth anything at all. If it was just a bunch of yahoos clamoring about the "currency of the future" thing, it probably would have gone absolutely fucking nowhere. The irony that the yahoos ended up becoming the majority I think is underappreciated.
- ang_cire 5mo ago> Why I'm Done Making Desktop Applications To save you a click: It's harder to monetize desktop apps than webapps. Lol. LMAO, even.
- whateveracct 5mo agoit's amazing how freeing working an office job is. my personal projects don't have concerns such as monetization.
- tonyedgecombe 5mo agoOn the other hand I spent 25 years selling desktop software and never once had an annual review. I never had to submit an application for time off. I never had to ask permission for a dentist appointment. If the weather was good I could take the day off and go for a bike ride. I didn’t attend any scrum meetings nor did I have to argue about what framework to use with a PM who couldn’t code FizzBuzz.
- whateveracct 5mo agoyeah but i get paid to use the toilet in my own home ig remote work is the best of both worlds
- fph 5mo agoDidn't HN have a "no clickbait titles" rule?
- traderj0e 5mo agoIt's not clickbait though
- swyx 5mo ago> Web Applications Convert Better ok, now do this analysis for mobile apps...
- autonomousErwin 5mo agoGrass always looks greener on the other side, mainly because it's been fertilised.
- binaryturtle 5mo agoNo, "grass always looks greener on the other side" is a perspective thing. If you stand on your own grass then you look down onto it and see the dirt, but if you look over to the other side you see the gras from the side which makes it look more dense and hides the dirt. But it's the same boring grass everywhere. :)
- nothrabannosir 5mo agoI preferred GPs poop joke version but to each their own.
- CobrastanJorji 5mo agoAt first, I thought "this is missing the point of the phrase" and moved on, but now I'm back to say it's stuck in my head and an intuitive, pretty neat way to think about it.
- em-bee 5mo agohah, i have been arguing this for years. first time to see someone else making the same argument. nice!
- ryandrake 5mo agoAlmost all of Patrick's points are great if your software development goal is to make a buck. They don't seem to matter if you're writing open source, and I'd argue that desktop apps are still relevant and wonderful in the open source world. I just started a new hobby project, and am doing it as a cross-platform, non-Electron, desktop app because that's what I like to develop. The onboarding funnel: Only a concern if you're trying to grow your user base and make sales. Conversion: Only a concern if you're charging money. Adwords: Only a concern if, in his words, you're trying to "trounce my competitors". Support: If you're selling your software, you kind of have to support it. Minor concern for free and open source. Piracy: Commercial software concern only. Analytics and Per-user behavior: Again, only commercial software seems to feel the need to spy on users and use them as A/B testing guinea pigs. The only point I can agree with him that makes web development better is the shorter development cycles. But I would argue that this is only a "developer convenience" and doesn't really matter to users (in fact, shorter development cycles can be worse for users as their software changes rapidly like quicksand out from under them.) To me, in my open source projects, my "development cycle" ends when I push to git, and that can be done as often as I want.
- tmtvl 5mo ago> Analytics and Per-user behavior: Again, only commercial software seems to feel the need to spy on users and use them as A/B testing guinea pigs. KDE has analytics, they're just disabled by default (and I always turn them on in the hopes of convincing KDE to switch the defaults to the ones I like).
- nonethewiser 5mo agoits just waaaaaay easier to distribute a web app For some things a desktop app is required (more system access) or offers some competitive UX advantage (although this reason is shrinking all the time). Short of that user's are going to choose web 95% of the time.
- mohamedkoubaa 5mo agoThis points to our failure as an industry to design a universal app engine that isn't a browser.
- onionisafruit 5mo agoThis is from 2009, and the title should say so.
- trueno 5mo agoyeah perfect, i came in here to say I'm done making web apps (2026). seriously desktop apps kinda own i just desktop-app'd a pwa made it do SSO auth at my org and now its just part of the self-serve application download kiosk and we're laughing at all the pain we've endured for so many years writing up proposals and billing to scale up web app infra for internal tooling and stuff. im kinda enjoying coming back to earth right now with my team and we're just hmmmmmmm'ing a lot of things like this. we've had devops chasing 23498234892% availability with k8s and load balancers and all this stuff and we're now assessing how much of that cruft was completely unnecessary and made everything some amorphous blob of complexity and unpredictable billing & and really gave devops a moat to just say "no" to so many things that came through the pipeline. there's so many things that can just be dragged back to like an actual on premise machine and served up through the internal network. we are... amused at how self-important we made ourselves out to be this past decade. we're probably like days worth of goofing away from going to buy a few mac minis and plug it into some uninterruptable power supplies and just seeing how un-serious we can get with so much tooling we've built over the years. and for everything else, desktop apps. seriously desktop apps is like free infrastructure if you build it right.
- rossant 5mo agoI was curious why AI wasn't mentioned. Then I noticed the date: 2009.
- wslh 5mo agoAnd, I also I think many of the mobile and web apps will end up in prompting in the next few years.
- qq66 5mo agoNothing in this article is wrong, but worth noting that pre-AI, the companies that most significantly transformed the way we use our computers (Slack, Spotify, VS Code, etc.) did ship desktop apps.
- duped 5mo agoAll of those examples are web apps, two of them started on the web itself, and none of them transformed anything about how we used our computers (slack replaced a number of competitors, spotify is iTunes for the web, and VS code is a smaller jetbrains)
- xp84 5mo ago“Desktop Apps”? I’d say pre-Electron, the ones that existed that far back shipped desktop apps, but for the past 10-15 years it’s all been Electron slop, which hardly qualify as “desktop apps” in my book. If anything, it’s my very faint hope that AI would give companies - especially non-software companies - the bandwidth to release two real native apps instead of just 2 builds of a shitty Electron app. Fat chance though, I think, not least because companies love to use their “bRaNdInG” on everything - so the native look and feel a real app gives you “for free” is a downside for the clowns that do the visual design for most companies.
- data-ottawa 5mo agoFor what it’s worth, I tried making a GTK4 app. I got started, created a window, created a header bar, then went to add a url/path entry widget and everything fell apart. Entry suggestions/completions are formally deprecated with no replacement since 2022. When I did get them working on the deprecated API there was an empty completion option that would segfault if clicked. The default behaviour didn’t hide completions on window unfocus, so my completions would hover over any other open window. There was seemingly no way to disambiguate tab vs enter events… it just sucked. So after adding one widget I abandoned the project. It felt like the early releases of SwiftUI where you could add a list view but then would run into weird issues as soon as you tried adding stuff to it. Similarly trying to build an app for macOS practically depends on Swift by Sundell Hacking with Swift or others to make up for Apple’s lack of documentation in many areas. For years stuff like NSColor vs Color and similar API boundaries added friction, and the native macOS SwiftUI components just never felt normal while I tried making apps. As heavy as web libraries and electron are, at least work mostly out of the box.
- neilv 5mo ago> However, the existence of pirates is a stitch in my craw, particularly when any schoolmarm typing the name of my software into Google is prompted to try stealing it instead: I wonder whether Google, in its Don't Be Evil era, ever considered what they should do about software piracy, and what they decided. I'd guess they would've decided to either discourage piracy, or at least not encourage it. In the screenshot, the Google search query doesn't say anything about wanting to pirate, yet Google is suggesting piracy, a la entrapment. (Though other history about that user may suggest a software piracy tendency, but still, Google knows what piracy seeking looks like, and they special-case all sorts of other topics.) Is the ethics practice to wait to be sued or told by a regulator to stop doing something? Or maybe they anticipate costs and competition for how they operate, and lobby for the regulation they want, so all they have to do is be compliant with it, and be let off the hook for lawsuits?
- steve1977 5mo agoDid Google ever have a real Don't be Evil era?
- neilv 5mo agoThey had to at least nominally have it, early on, to be able to hire the best Internet-savvy people. Tech industry culture today is pretty much finance bro culture, plus a couple decades of domain-specific conditioning for abuse. But at the time Google started, even the newly-arrived gold rush people didn't think like that. And the more experienced people often had been brought up in altruistic Internet culture: they wanted to bring the goodness to everyone, and were aware of some abuse threats by extrapolating from non-Internet society.
- fragmede 5mo ago'99 to 2004. You had to have been there, maaaan...
- steve1977 5mo agoI've been there when Google was altavista.digital.com ;)
- franga2000 5mo agoNot off to a great start... The "look how many steps it takes to convert shareware users" is insanely overblown. 1-4. Google, find, read... this is the same for web apps. 2. Click download and wait a few seconds. Not enough time to give up because native apps are small. Heavy JS web apps might load for longer than that. 3. Click on the executable that the browser pops up in front of you. No closing the browser or looking for your downloads folder. It's right there! 3.5. You probably don't need an installer and it definitely doesn't need a multi-step wizard. Maybe a big "install" button with a smaller "advanced options". 3.6. Your installer (if you even have it) autostarts the program after finishing 4. The user uses it and is happy. 5. Some time later, the program prompts the user to pay, potentially taking them directly onto the payment form either in-app or by opening it in a browser. 6. They enter their details and pay. That's one step more than a web app, but also a much bigger chance the user will come back to pay (you can literally send them a popup, you're a native app!).
- monooso 5mo agoIf my failing memory serves, those were valid concerns in 2009, when this was written.
- sevenzero 5mo agoThese are still valid concerns given that people become less and less tech savy with actual computers
- mitjam 5mo agoAnd today there is a new 0: The user has and sits at a desktop computer, at all.
- righthand 5mo agoI’m actually hopping on the desktop applications train. Though not for money. I just think the browser is becoming a surveillance plague of computing and we need MORE high quality desktop software not built on the invasive web stack to counter it.
- jrm4 5mo agoGreat, good riddance. Hopefully open source and/or AI push this person out of developing entirely. People who focus this much on "conversion" et al are dinosaurs who deserve extinction.
- monooso 5mo agoFirst up, this article is 17 years old. There's no reason to assume the author has exactly the same opinions today. More importantly, the author is talking about the realities of trying to earn a decent living shipping independent software. That requires paying customers. It's perfectly reasonable to want to be paid for your work, and it certainly doesn't warrant the vitriol in your comment.
- traderj0e 5mo agoPlease tell me at least you don't work some software corp where it's someone else's job to worry about the business, if you're going to pass that kind of judgement.
- hermitcrab 5mo agoIs a commercial software vendor not supposed to care how many sales they make?
- mwkaufma 5mo agoOver a decade of circular "web apps are better for the subset of problems webapps are good at" tautologies.
- traderj0e 5mo agoWeb apps weren't so easy to make back then, so standalone apps were the norm. Shortly before 2009 a lot of the web apps were Java or Adobe Flash, and 2009 was part of the transition period where platforms were at war with that stuff but open-web alternatives weren't mature yet.
- mwkaufma 5mo agoYeah I know I was there -- also today's wasteful "open-web alternatives" wouldn't fly anyway, because I recall even during the XP era having min-specs of, like, 800mhz/512mb
- traderj0e 5mo agoYeah, they were like "Flash is too slow" then the replacement was 5x slower
- yen223 5mo agoNo one argued Flash was too slow, they argued (correctly) that Flash was closed source, proprietary, and had a lot of security issues
- traderj0e 5mo agoThe most famous criticism of Flash was "Thoughts on Flash" by Steve Jobs, which said among other things that it's too inefficient. He did cite inconsistent hardware acceleration for H.264 that was a real performance drawback of Flash for video in particular, and was also complaining about the power usage for interactive Flash content in general. Jobs was right at the time from what I can tell, but somehow the end result was even slower stuff. People did keep repeating the line that Flash is slow. I also remember people citing performance as a reason YouTube switched from Flash to HTML5. Searching those blogs now is giving a lot of 404s. Like I said this should've helped since it's video, but somehow YouTube immediately got slower anyway back then. Back then I installed an extension to force it to use QuickTime Player for that reason. The proprietary and insecure parts were real problems too. I'm fine with the decisions that were made, but this was a drawback.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5mo agoIt's hard to believe not only that this is 17 years old, but that I remember when he posted it!
- projektfu 5mo agoLol, it's less than 10 years old. The 80s were 20 years ago.
- Aurornis 5mo agoThe author (who is a frequent commenter here) started a company called Appointment Reminder after writing this, which for years was my favorite example of an independent small company that identified a niche, served it well, and then went on to be acquired. There's an interview with him on the subject that is sadly behind a paywall now: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-my-appointment-reminder-business-to-12k-mo-beIP7hx2FslA9iDbG2Tm https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-grew-my-appointment-... The world has changed a lot since then. The days where 37 Signals could build an empire out of simple web form apps and individuals could build and sell a SaaS that sends reminder texts are long gone. Most of the low hanging fruit was mined out long ago and most simple services have seen 100 different startups try to serve them already. As much as Appointment Reminder was my prime example of a successful indie SaaS, the author's second startup has (with all due respect) become one of my prime examples of not validating product-market fit before building your product. They went on to build Starfighter, a company that was supposed to be a candidate vetting platform where people could do complex coding challenges and then get matched up with companies wanting to hire people. It was built partially in the open through their newsletter and in Hacker News posts. If you thought doing LeetCode problems to get interviews was annoying, imagine having to spend hours or days going through a CTF where you hack multi-core CPUs to do something complex with a simulated stock market. I can't even remember the entire premise, but every time I read something about the company it was getting more and more complex. At the same time I was on other forums where candidates were going the opposite direction: becoming frustrated with the proliferation of coding interviews and refusing to do interview challenges that would take hours of their time. I remember through the entire process thinking that it seemed like a questionable business plan that wouldn't really appeal to companies or to candidates. Even the Hacker News comments were full of (surprisingly polite) feedback saying that investing a lot of hours into solving programming puzzles to maybe get some recruiter interest wasn't appealing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10480390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10480390 Some amazing foreshadowing in that thread from one of the co-founders (not Patrick McKenzie): > I literally lack the ability to form coherent sentences about our business that don't somehow involve how to render a graph of AVR basic blocks in a React web app, is how little we're thinking about how the game interacts with recruiting right now. > We are going to get the CTF right, and then work from there to a sustainable recruiting business. We should have done it the other way around, but we didn't. :) As you might have guessed, it didn't work out at all. It was weird for me to follow one of my indie startup heroes on their journey into their second business that skipped all of the normal startup advice and then reached the exact conclusion that advice was warning against. It was enlightening to follow along and I'm glad they tried something different and shared it along the way, but watching it happen was a turning point for me in how I approach advice from any one individual author, blogger, writer, or influencer.
- taude 5mo agoWe should do more of this, hacker news, surface 17 year old articles and then debate like they were written yesterday!
- mattfrommars 5mo agoI have lot and hate relationship with windows native desktop application. As a kid, I use to look for something GUI application and .exe application since they are breeze to run and just felt right. Now in my day job, I just dislike developing for windows desktop application - partly probably the application is massive and super slow to develop or just there isn't a lot of investment from the company stand point into the product.
- shevy-java 5mo agoWell ... 17 years ago. "Over roughly the same period my day job has changed and transitioned me from writing thick clients in Swing to big freaking enterprise web apps." I mean, the web kind of won. We just don't have a simple and useful way to design for the web AND the desktop at the same time. I also use the www of course, with a gazillion of useful CSS and JavaScript where I have to. I have not entirely given up on the desktop world, but I abandoned ruby-gtk and switched to ... jruby-swing. I know, I know, nobody uses swing anymore. The point is not so much about using swing per se, but simply to have a GUI that is functional on windows, with the same code base (I ultimately use the same code base for everything on the backend anyway). I guess I would fully transition into the world wide web too, but how can you access files on the filesystem, create directories etc... without using node? JavaScript is deliberately restricted, node is pretty awful, ruby-wasm has no real documentation.
- dusted 5mo agoFuck. Web. Apps.
- rustcleaner 5mo agoNever depend on anything you can't later privateer when the publisher decides to retroactively change the deal (or worse: when they become a subscription "service"). Minimize regular payment sinks. Owning your own infrastructure will always be cheaper in the long run; when you rent, you're paying the cost of ownership plus maintenance plus profit. Sure there may be an economy of scale, but what are you trading for that scale (loss of privacy, loss of sovereignty, loss of ownership, loss of control)? Just. Don't. Subscribe. Simple!
- Decabytes 5mo agoFlutter has brought the joy of desktop gui programming back for me. Especially in this vibe coding era, building all those apps that only really have value to me has never been easier. And seeing the support for Flutter from Canonical has been nice. They’ve been helping make flutter on Linux better
- arikrahman 5mo agoI came to the same conclusion but due to the Web tooling being much better with Clojure. The Clojure toolchains to develop desktop apps like ClojureDart are too brittle from my experience.
- CMay 5mo agoIn practice this was about a product that is not targeted at desktop-savvy people. At the same time, you also have people who know "this isn't a hard problem, why do I need go through all this. let me go look for someone who did it better." Not to mention all of their younger tech savvy family telling them, "don't download anything!" If your product targets a segment that expects a desktop app, do that. Web app, do that. Phone app, do that. Something like this would have worked if it was still back in the Walmart bargain software shelf where people could impulse buy a CD, put it into their computer and have it automatically start and install, then show up on the desktop. Despite that being less common now, it was more streamlined in a way for many users. Many of those people probably aren't logged into Steam or Windows Store either, so you have to do your own thing. It makes sense that web is the least friction for those people.
- zeroc8 5mo agoIf he had used Delphi, the app would have been a single self contained exe. No JVM updates to worry about.