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Comment by VyseofArcadia | Hacker News Reader

I think a good question to ask is, what is gained here by being a web app? Couldn't this just be an Android or iPhone (or even desktop!) app?

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Web app = Always on. No interruption from power outages or wifi problems. Higher bandwidth and more anonymous (if it's going to make requests).

Virtual android device in the cloud might be a great model for it since Android has good built-in security and process isolation.

> Web app = Always on. No interruption from power outages or wifi problems

Web apps don't magically produce their own compute, power and networking. They still need to be run on something.

(Web app does not automatically equal SaaS, especially in this case that is explicitly billed as self-hosted.)

Unless you're self-hosting on the same computer you're using, a web app is, by definition, software as a service. But then, either you're just... running a program, or your self-hosted application lives somewhere else that still requires power and network connectivity.

I promise, everyone, it is very legal and very cool to just write applications that run without TCP roundtrips. I promise.

"Unless you're self-hosting on the same computer you're using, a web app is, by definition, software as a service"

This sentence makes no sense to me. "Self-hosting" and "software as a service" are diametrically opposed things.

> Unless you're self-hosting on the same computer you're using, a web app is, by definition, software as a service.

This seems extremely arbitrary and seems to assume some implicit definitions that are not common, and in fact are the opposite of what I've heard used.

IME software as a service generally speaking means somebody else is doing all the hosting and you as an end user just point your browser to it or in some cases install a local app (and often you put in your credit card and pay a monthly subscription). Self-hosting means you do all that hosting yourself. I've never seen something marketed as SaaS that expected you to host the server-side yourself, but I'd be happy to hear of an example.

> I promise, everyone, it is very legal and very cool to just write applications that run without TCP roundtrips. I promise.

That's a hell of a strawman against an argument I see nobody making.

Exactly. I want the reliability of professional hosting, the ease of a phone app install, and the ownership/control of open source.

I still can't use it if my power or internet are out though, even if the server still has both.

(Rephrased to be less mean.)

I think this comment is unnecessarily rude

You're right. Thanks for calling me out on it. I've toned down the snark.

My little tangent here is about trying to combine the benefits of open source apps that are fully under the users control with the benefits of cloud hosting while trying to avoid the configuration and administration headache of a raw AWS/Azure/Hetzner/Heroku/Digital Ocean/etc. setup.

Web apps are absolutely not always on, and they are absolutely not more anonymous...

AWS uptime is better than any server I've run at home, and an AWS IP is less personally identifiable than my home IP.

I think it's pretty obvious from the context that GP is talking about a self-hosted web app on a VPS or cloud provider. It's a lot more "always on" than your smartphone, and the anonymity is the same.

I can access it from any of my devices (laptops, desktop, phone), and my family can use it too.

Well that question implies that there is some intrinsic reason not to build it as a web app. That may be the case for you if you prefer Kotlin or Swift or something, but it wouldn't be the case for me.

There is a quote that informs my thinking on this.

"The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is the continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry" -Henry Petroski

Efficiency is very important to me. (And in the era of climate change, it should be important to everyone.) I consider web apps to be about the least efficient form of software yet discovered. We suddenly need two relatively beefy computers with multi-GHz multi-core processors and GB of RAM, one of which must be powered on 24/7, to do something that could have been done on the hardware of the mid-80s.

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