This pendulum will keep swinging. All of this has happened before and will happen again. The question that I got from the original article is not if there is pressure to move back to local applications (there is), but if we've hit the maxima for remote (webapp) applications. Eventually the remote-first momentum will wane and we will cycle back towards local applications, data locality, and local processing. We've been pushing so far with remote, web based applications for many years now. Email was first, but then came video and office applications.

Mainframes -> microcomputers -> appliances (phones, tablets) -> whatever's next... (home servers?)

At some point it will swing back. It won't look exactly the same, but the industry will swing back. It might not be for speed, but as you say, for privacy. It's easier to protect data that is physically close to you.

We will probably also swing back from microservices with HTTP APIs towards monolithic applications. But that's another thread!

> Websites get hacked and people's data get stolen all the time. Also, do I really control and own the data I generate on these sites.

Unless legislation forces application providers to be accountable for privacy breaches, with tough penalties, I don’t see why privacy-sensitive users should forego applications that work with local files, moreso if those applications are free.

Unrelatedly, the author explicitly states that Electron apps aren’t real desktop apps. So he’s talking about native apps.