The web however did eat the desktop: everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app.
I have literally 4 apps that I use on my machine: terminal and postman in addition to the above.
I am wondering why mobile apps too haven't entirely been replaced by Web apps
The media creation community is looks at the web programming community and wondering what the hell you are talking about, and why your view is so narrow.
Blender, ZBrush, Unreal Engine, Visual Studio, ProTools, Reaper, Substance Suite etc. etc. the list goes on and on. These kind of applications often have extremely heavy system requirements and are often extremely sensitive to latency, and are just not going up and "migrate to the cloud" anytime soon.
Embedded programming is another example. A lot of developers work in this space.
> I have literally 4 apps that I use on my machine: terminal and postman in addition to the above.
Your personal requirements, as lightweight and easily offloadable as they are, do not represent the wider community. I am constantly astounded by how blinkered the web community appears to be about this.
We can choose to disagree on this point, however...
>> everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app
It is a long way from the parent's comment (above) to "if your app can be browser based and still functional, it should be".
Maybe it should, maybe it shouldn't, but that doesn't contradict my point that the parent is incorrect in that "everything other the browser and the text editor is now a web app". You're arguing a different thing.
There are plenty of apps, as I described above, that don't have functional web-based equivalents, and probably will not for a very long time to come. There are enough niche industries with such requirements that combined, they will act as a counterweight to the push for everything to run as a web app for quite some time.
This right here is the reason there are many browser-based apps - it's really convenient for the company, damn the users. The company can do whatever they want, whenever they want and have full access to both telemetry and user data.
video editing, DAWs, music notation, CAD/CAM, 3D modelling (think Blender), compilers, linkers, IDE's other than VSCode, local photo management, media players, messaging services (telegram etc), device management ... these and many more called and laughed at your claim.
WhatsApp is of course available on the web. I'm a regular user of play.spotify.com, works great. Figma is a great design tool available only on the web.
I do get your point, but there are more and more things moving to the web as more and more standards are being published (if you think this is a good idea is another discussion).
Modern html and CSS is by far the least complex GUI framework I've used. And it is (somewhat) cross platform.
Apple has made it so that every browser on their mobile devices is basically really Safari under the hood. And they have purposefully crippled Safari to push developers to the lucrative app store. Nothing is going to change until this changes, either through consumer behavior or through legislation.
One reason is we don't have unlimited energy sources on mobile devices. I am yet to see a non-trivial "web app" that can run fast without drawing kilowatts from the outlet.
The companies making web browsers and mobile operating systems are the same companies making native applications stores and requesting 30% of the revenue, so they don't have any good reason to make web applications better. They are not non profit.
Electron apps are perhaps faster and cheaper to make than native desktop GUI apps for most organizations because they already have Web developers, but I've never heard anyone claim they're "better" than native, if that's what you're saying. Do you mean they're somehow better for the end user? If so, how?
You also get a good application on all platforms, GNU/Linux, Windows, and Mac which is nice and used to not be the case.
I don't use it enough to have any of the hotkeys that aren't bog-standard memorized, and the refusal to add menu options or toolbar buttons makes discoverability really bad.
Harder to track people and feed them ads.
This is it. And it's really the app stores that make them so.
On desktop, people are wary about installing programs, because they can pretty much do anything. So you can get people to visit your website who would never in a million years install your app on their PC.
With app stores, people assume that apps are safe, because that's what they were promised. But then the apps are hoovering up all their personal information, even more than they get from a web page on a desktop. And the app stores that claim to be constraining bad behavior don't kick them out for it because huge social networks are some of the few companies with enough market power to divert their users to another phone platform.
While mobile apps are quite awful from this perspective, you must consider that the web is by far the most efficient platform for ad delivery and tracking.
It's the web which has cookie pop-ups with dozens and dozens of companies that want to track you.
It's the web which led to the development of ad blockers.
It's the web where an app developer has full access to your data on their servers.
It's the web where an app developer can at any time flip a switch and turn on telemetry, ads, etc.
In native apps, you mean?
There is a good reason why so many websites push you to use the apps on mobile.
[0] https://f-droid.org/de/packages/net.kollnig.missioncontrol.f...
[1] https://f-droid.org/de/packages/nya.kitsunyan.foxydroid/
And those are just the non-electron, non-web-frontend apps I regularly use, and still excludes games.
While this is less of a concern for Google (the Android supports alternative app stores, and Google would love it if we all used Chrome), switching to mobile apps will deprive Apple of a significant source of revenue derived from the App Store. Thus, it is in Apple's best interest for developers to continue writing iPhone/iPad apps and Apple receiving a chunk for each sale than for developers to write Web apps and Apple not receiving a cut.
Simple equation. Efficiency of a mobile device is directly proportional to the efficiency of the runtime the apps are running on. For example Objective-C / swift has a GC-less memory model which just means we get to do more with less memory. This is how iPhone typically ship with lesser RAM than Android phones, yet do everything that Android phones are capable of surprisingly well.
Desktops/Laptops have no need to worry about extreme memory efficiency. They are always/usually connected to a power outlet. But mobile platforms on the other hand need extreme memory efficiency to get by with battery power.
If you do the math, the abstractions that the web provides comes with a huge cost. A virtual rendering engine, a programming runtime that is notorious for bad memory management and all this on top of a huge VM called the browser. It doesn't scale.
You forgot CPU that's light-years ahead of anything that Qualcomm or Samsung have. But, please, keep thinking that it is about Swift/Objective-C, lol.
That's a relatively recent development.
iOS's lower memory usage compared to Android, however, has been forever.
No, it's not. Apple been dominating mobile since a5.
Relative to inception of iOS and Android, which is since when iPhones has got away with shipping less RAM compared to Android flagships.
Isn't this obvious - the web is deliberately crippled on mobile platforms like iOS.
There are many Cordova/Capacitor-based web apps in a Webview shell with access to native APIs.
Also, I don't really use mobile apps for most social media which have working mobile web pages.