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Well, their web app tracks the history and changes of your repo hosted there. It means you see them only after you perform a push.

On the announcement they say: > But those things are only great after you've pushed your code to GitHub.

With the desktop app you can manage your local repository before pushing changes to github

Git is tracking the changes and history, not GitHub.

Ah, that's what I missed. So it's technically possible to have all of the niceties of GitHub without having to use GitHub?

Absolutely correct: GitHub just put a GUI on top on that, although it is a very neat one.