this is something that you might value but I think it's fair to say it is already a minority position.
phones and the web have become the primary platform for software delivery, and people do not treat their desktop if they even have one as some sort of premium platform, it's a terminal for the internet.
at this point, people are probably more familiar with the look and feel of web applications than they are with native applications and value similarity across platforms over features of individual platforms. The operating system and the hardware are increasingly becoming irrelevant and a detail compared to the web on top.
Follow the money. People pay for what they value. Who is paying money for desktop software besides games, Office 365, and the Adobe Creative Suite?
Who values desktop software enough to pay for it? I know in the Mac market at least, the few indy developers making money are not writing apps using cross platform SDKs.
Lots of business running Windows on their labs and using desktop software for various use cases, like data analysis.
Plenty of money to be made desktop solutions to life sciences, manufacturing, factory automation, aren't plugging their air gaped dashboards to the web.
Anyone doing music composition, graphics, animation, infotainment systems.
In Europe there are enough Win32, WPF, UWP, Qt related jobs and consulting projects with hourly rates to do a comfortable living.
As for B2C, it is always going to be an uphill battle regardless of the application type, there are only so many application types that one is willing to pay for outside established brands, and SaaS is a much better way to avoid piracy and get everyone to pay.
Someone is paying for games. What other B2C software is making money from the general consumer (besides MS) and not the “prosumer” who is buying software to help them run their business?
Just like someone is still paying for desktop software, in spite of piracy and SaaS.
All those small companies that manage to have their software exposed on shops like Saturn here in Germany, or do direct sales over their web site.
And just because it is B2C, Prosummer or used via a tablet plugged into a docking station, it doesn't stop being desktop software, from the points of view who's paying and selling it.
And regarding games, anyone with experience on the field knows how much harder it is to make any kind of living out of them versus regular desktop software.
The success/failure rate is much higher, with the large majority of studios never making any dime.
Office already uses react native for parts of their desktop and mobile platforms, win32 is in the process of integrating react-native support. So does Adobe at least if their github is any indication.
And if you look at the end consumer software which have billions of users, who in one way or the other pay for it, it's almost always built on web tech these days. Discord, Skype, Slack, Spotify, and so on.
Of course there's professional or industrial software written in native code. But that's not because it's popular, it's because it's niche and specialised. The business model of charging upfront isn't exactly a sign of popularity, if anything it's the opposite.
No one cares about the Spotify UI. People don’t interact with Spotify that much. They listen to it.
The business model of charging upfront isn't exactly a sign of popularity, if anything it's the opposite.
In a capitalist system how else do you measure value than what people are willing to pay enough for to have a sustainable business? End users aren’t paying for Slack. They are using the free plan because it’s good enough.
I literally can't follow your points. Of course people care about the Spotify UI, that's how they interact with Spotify. And it doesn't matter if end users or businesses pay for Slack, people do pay for Slack and its software and UI is part of what they pay for.
Are you just going to find a different reason why you're going to ignore software built on a web tech-stack? Add up the market valuation of all companies using web technology to bring software to their users. Then compare it to the native market. It's not even close.
It's perfectly fine to use market value to estimate utility in a capitalist system. You just can't ignore every piece of software you don't like.
this is something that you might value but I think it's fair to say it is already a minority position.
phones and the web have become the primary platform for software delivery, and people do not treat their desktop if they even have one as some sort of premium platform, it's a terminal for the internet.
at this point, people are probably more familiar with the look and feel of web applications than they are with native applications and value similarity across platforms over features of individual platforms. The operating system and the hardware are increasingly becoming irrelevant and a detail compared to the web on top.