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Comment by c-linkage | Hacker News Reader

> deploying native applications is simply too costly.

I do not understand why people hold this impression, especially in corporate environments.

Windows supports both system and per-user deployments; the latter so you don't even need administrator rights. And with Intune, deployments can be pulled or pushed.

Many desktop applications are written in .Net so you don't even need to install the runtime because it's preinstalled on the operating system.

Even ClickOnce deployments -- which you can deploy on the web or on a file share -- pretty much make deployments painless.

EDIT: For the naysayers: please then explain to me why Steam is so successful at deploying large games on multiple platforms?

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We have 2 main products: a SaaS and a desktop app (1mln+ users combined). It's a pain in the ass to support the desktop app:

- many people refuse to upgrade for various reasons so we have to support ancient versions (especially for important clients), for stuff like license activations etc.

- various misconfigurations (or OS updates) on Windows can make the app suddenly crash and burn - and you waste time investigating the problem. My favorite recent bug: the app works OK everywhere except on some Japanese systems where it just crashes with access violation (see the next bullet point)

- debugging is hard, because you don't have immediate access to the machine where the bug triggered

- originally it was built 100% for Windows but now we have people asking for a MacOS port and it's a lot of work

- people crack our protection 1 day after release and can use it without paying

SaaS has none of those problems:

- people are used to the fact that SaaS applications are regularly updated and can't refuse to upgrade

- modern browsers are already cross-platform

- browser incompatibilities are easier to resolve

- you debug your own, well-known environment

- if someone doesn't play by the rules, you just restrict access with 1 button

You could of course also make your desktop app auto update without offering a way to refuse. Or you could make it display an error, if the user accesses it without being at the newest version, and block all further interaction. Those are considered impolite, but it seems you are doing it anyway in your web app already.

Even the most friction-free ClickOnce deployment is going to be more of a deployment hassle than "hey, users, you know how you go to https://subdomain.local-intranet/place to add or subtract items from the inventory database? Well, continue doing that".

The webapp doesn't care if someone's machine was down overnight or if the paranoid lady in design managed to install some local "antivirus" which blocked the updated rollout or if the manager of sales has some unique setting on his machine which for some inscrutable reason does silly things to the new version. If their web browser works, the inventory database works for them, and they're on the latest version. If their web browser doesn't work, well, your support teams would have had to eventually take care of that anyway.

Some people should probably only be given thin clients, because they are too inept to be allowed to handle anything else.

Not sure yet how to solve this problem on the Internet yet though. How can we prevent uninformed masses from creating incentives for businesses, that turn the web into a dystopia?

The web browser is not some magic tool that is always guaranteed to work. Group policy alone can wreck total havoc on web apps on all the major browsers.

This would be noticed immediately when all of the workers under the group policy try to access their email in the morning

That sounds nice and it probably works fine if you're targeting a single business running Windows, but targeting Mac, Windows and Linux remains more difficult, no?

And is there even a guarantee that your deploy will be rolled out in X minutes?

Version skew remains one of the biggest sources of catastrophic bugs at the company I work for, and that's not even taking into client app ver, just skew between the several services we have. Once you add client app ver, we have to support things for 3 years.

At my one-person company I just do a Kubernetes deploy, it goes out in a couple minutes and everyone has the latest ver whether they like it or not. I don't have the resources to maintain a dozen versions simultaneously.

There’s a hidden cost in web applications as well: you lose the value of the operating systems application language. Every website and thus electron app suffers from this. There’s no standard place for settings, buttons and windows don’t behave normally. There’s a lot of value in native apps in usability just in it sharing the same UX language as the operating system. Sadly this is mostly dead for new applications.

Building a game for multiple platforms for steam is way more work than building a single web app. Builting the game often requires unique settings for each platform, machines for each target platform, testing on each target platform, dealing with bugs on each target platform. Getting noterized/certified on each

> EDIT: For the naysayers: please then explain to me why Steam is so successful at deploying large games on multiple platforms?

How many games are multi-platform on steam? Checking the top 20 current most played games, 14 of them are windows only. If it's so easy to be multi-platform, why would 14 of the top 20 games not be multi-platform? Oh, it's because it's NOT EASY. Conversely, web apps are cross platform by default.

Only 2 of the top 20 games supported 3 platforms (windows, mac, steam-deck). 1 was windows+steam-deck, 3 were windows+mac

> For the naysayers: please then explain to me why Steam is so successful at deploying large games on multiple platforms?

Because Valve puts lots of time and money into making it work for their customers (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/graphs/contributors), time and money that the average small business can't afford.

Here's a good example: I used Weylus which turns any touch device (phone, tablet etc) into a drawing tablet + screen mirror. It can be used to turn your iPad into a second monitor or as a touch device for your laptop.

Weylus gives you a URL that you can visit on the device and instantly use it. Try doing that with native apps. They'd need native apps for Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android... get them on the app stores too, support all the different Linux distros... or just a single URL that works instantly anywhere.

Steam works for the same reason the App Store works, it targets mostly a single platform (Windows) and all dependencies are bundled in. The Steam client itself is a web app running on the chrome engine, though.

In large corporate environments I agree but small companies still mostly don’t have central management of end user computers. They order a computer from Dell and use it as delivered. Much easier to just access everything via a browser that way.

> Many desktop applications are written in .Net so you don't even need to install the runtime because it's preinstalled on the operating system.

The last .NET version to be deployed this way has a 10 year old feature set. Nowadays you bundle the parts of .NET you need with the application.

You can still do system wide deployments with .NET Core, or .NET 5+, as you prefer to call it.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/window...

Of course. I was strictly refering to .NET preinstalled in Windows as per the comment I replied to, which I believe only applies to Framework 4.8.

Although, on re-read, maybe they meant there's a good chance another application already installed it? This I wouldn't agree with, as applications often insist on installing different versions of the system-wide runtime, even for the same major version.

It doesn't usually happen (on Windows but realistically elsewhere too) unless you publish an application as self-contained.

To be specific, .NET install is version-aware and would manage those side by side, unless the destination folder is overridden.

> please then explain to me why Steam is so successful at deploying large games on multiple platforms?

if you look into the support forums on steam for any random game you'll find lots of complaints about stability and crashes, many of which are likely to be esoteric system-specific problems.

That’s a very ironic example given that the Steam Client is a web-app hosted in Chromium.

I get the impression this is said by people who observe large enterprises or don't have good device management. I work for a big company that deploys proper MDM to our Macs and PCs, and as long as the application is packaged correctly, they sure can push stuff out fast and without user intervention, including killing a running process if they so choose. Making an app that packages well is also hard, but that's not on those who push them to environments.

I love ClickOnce and am amazed that it never got that popular. Installs and updates are seamless.

I wrote an inventory management program for my father's hazardous waste company. Used .net mvc as the backend, WPF as the frontend. WPF sucks in many ways, but I got it working and have had zero complaints.

I built that program almost 20 years ago. Until last year I spend maybe 5-6 hours total in maintenance, mostly ssl cert updates. Let that sink in.

> it's preinstalled on the operating system.

Not on my computers. At home, or at work

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