
Is Desktop Development Dead? Or Still Worth It? - BerislavLopac
https://insights.dice.com/2020/03/04/desktop-development-dead-still-worth-it/
======
raxxorrax
I think so. For productive office jobs, a desktop is still a must have.
Audits, quality assurance, production planning, sales planning, reclamations,
presentations, any form of computer aided engineering, accounting... just
random examples on top of my head.

Sure, there could theoretically be a a webapp that can do all this, but there
isn't. A penalty is that your QA SaaS service needs to interface employee
information and maybe access article information living inside your ERP.
Problems start to occur here.

Apps on the web or phone are good for any workflow where your input is
basically "yes/no". I think html can be a good compromise for UIs, but that
isn't enough to replace desktop software.

I don't see many webapps in any production critical process, they only pop up
for some administrative tasks and even that is limited. Maybe you are an IT
consultant with everything in the cloud. Or maybe you deliver food or offer
transport and orders are managed in an online service. That works, but
widespread applications are limited.

------
mimixco
I don't think users care how software is deployed. (ie: does it live on the
web or in their desktop?) But what looks dead to me is _desktop-specific_
development.

With modern UI frameworks and Electron, you can deliver an app that looks
"desktop" to the user but is written with standard, simple web technologies.
Those apps interact with your peripherals and are indistinguishable from
desktop apps.

The advantage to letting go of proprietary "desktop" software is that a single
codebase can actually look and work the same on PCs, Macs, and Linux --
something no desktop provider has given us.

------
non-entity
I mean for some applications you're going to gave to have a desktop app,
particularly anything that communicates with external devices or most OS
related components.

Although the ways people will convince themselves otherwise are pretty
comical. I had written a desktop app that communicated with a card scanning
device via a simple protocol over a serial port. Someone proceeded to tell me
that desktop apps in 201 _X_ are bad. They told me the preferred alternative
was to write a webserver that did the serial port communication and also
served a web based UI which seemed ridiculous at best.

