I work with lean, business speculative software mostly. Which means not cross-platform native development is simply not economical to do. I generally need to be able to hit Windows, iOS, Android, and MacOS square on with one code base.

A "native" electron or capacitor distribution system is a fine extension of a local-first web client. And an advantage of building fat clients generally is they lend themselves to such distribution models much easier than say, htmx or hotwire.

Native fat client have had their benefits and lots of people still prefer them, but always had the drawback of manual data management and installs. Being able to leverage any device you own with a cloud synced local-first client really gives you the best of both worlds.

But not all software fits readily within this model.

Excel is a great fat client. Writing a sync in VBA is not, but some of the pieces are already there.

I wish we would go in the opposite direction, let's make a web standard for app stores and app package files, and let web apps handle native file extensions.

Then we can write apps once and run them everywhere, desktop and mobile.

Basically what proper mobile OS applications are.