Relative to the same apps 5+ years ago. I'm not claiming there are better GUI apps. I'm saying that the quality of the native apps has decayed, with prominent bugs or poor designs that have been around for years.
This is what happens when the same hyper-smart people get to chip away at n% annual performance gains in V8 for 20 years. Apple, on the other hand, pushes major UI system refactors every ~10 years, disrupting all the hard-fought stability and optimizations that have been made to that point. Microsoft pushes new ways to build UIs, it seems, even more often.
I'd be curious which apps you'd consider the best examples of this high quality experience? The only web app I even think is worth commenting on is Figma, which is easily the best web app I've ever used, but an app I'd only rank as mid-tier overall. VS Code is the closest analogy, VS Code is clearly a great app overall, in that it solves it's need very effectively, but its not an app I exudes quality the way the apps listed here do https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252567 (as an example of how VS Code doesn't exude quality, note how when VS Code loads it's UI elements for the first time, each element pops in separately, instead of the entire UI displaying instantly and simultaneously, this creates the impression of the app struggling to display its textual UI). I think Figma is slightly worse than VS Code, mainly because it's a web app, which presents all sorts of problems inherent to the platform, e.g.:
- Conflicts between keyboard shortcuts with the browser/web app split
- Bizarre tacked-on native-app affordances (e.g., breaking the back button and high-jacking the right-click contextual menu, both to essentially disguise the fact it's a web app?)
- Poor fit with the URL overall as a UI element (e.g., what does the URL mean when you're knee-deep in a single component in a larger document?)
In summary, the web's core UI elements just don't seem fit well with desktop use cases. I can understand web apps being a nice compromise, e.g., collaborating on Google Docs/Figma is a good practical fit (the web helps with a lot of the challenge of collaborating on the same doc). But they never feel pleasant or high quality to me.
I believe there is a few reasons:
- the reliance on clouds for many people, so it becomes more convenient to load your data in a browser window than fetch it locally
- the mixing of UI elements and data makes for more flexible software because the boundaries are not strong for many applications, data can be UI as well
- the inherent lock in and facilitation of licence management for the developer. A web software can't be pirate in any meaningful way to it's easier to require people to pay
- the large improvements in computing power that makes lower performance of the web software almost a non-issue for an increasingly large amount of applications
- and of course the major optimisations the stack has received, enabling better software overtime
Apple is still pushing the local first with native UI software in the name of privacy but at the same time they are also pushing cloud stuff and are not very competitive cost wise.
There is still some use cases where local first is necessary, like video editing and its large files, that Apple target quite well. But it's not clear how long that is going to last. Even resident fiber connections have increased speed quite a lot and if you can ingest a remote server fast enough, it won't matter that much if it's local. The UI just has to stream the data view in real time fast enough, which is already fine with most fiber connections. The major issue is latency but that is becoming much better with router upgrade and data center placed at key geographical places to serve most people well.
I would root for the "Apple way" if they would keep the personal computer that you fully control philosophy but instead, they are pushing "services" stuff for revenue just like the others. You end up paying more for not many benefits.
This is the problem with the iPhone as well, because in theory you could use it without iCloud but in practice many of the features rely heavily on it and they have made zero investment in local first use case. This can be seen in the absolutely abysmal transfer speed of a wired iPhone (still USB 2 for most models, like WTF) and just generally terrible syncing if you don't use iCloud. We are very far from the iLife promise of Steve Jobs and it just doesn't make any sense to overpay for them to hold all the control.