Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised there isn't a startup solving this. Cross-platform Sparkle for updates (probably written in Rust), payment processing, DRM. Maybe even some sort of App Store-like thing for discoverability.

I'm also kinda surprised how desktop app development is not not quite as "hip" as mobile. I'm guessing it's due to the relatively difficulty compared with mobile.

View on HN

I'm glad it's not hip, less competiton for us Mac developers! iOS developers are welcome to their overcrowded market.

Why ship a desktop app when you can ship a browser product?

The business incentives often outweigh the technical benefits of desktop apps. DRM and payment processing are easy. Discoverability is a shit show but the only competitive advantage to app stores is exclusivity. No need to worry about provisioning user machines, DLL hell, whatever.

And whatever you do you're going to pay a couple of release engineers anyway.

Maybe you are building something performance sensitive.

DLL hell isn’t a problem. You can just ship a stand-alone binary if you want.

Figma has shown if you want perf, you write it in C++ and distribute as web assembly and still stay in the browser.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com