The author missed two key selling points of web apps. Firstly, users don't need to install to use web apps. They just need to open whatever browser and go to whatever url and the app is already there. Imagine if users have to install 100 desktop apps to have the same set of features which 100 websites offer. It's normal before the web era but ridiculous now. Secondly, web apps enable extremely fast iterating development and release. You can ship new versions as quick as you want, no delay, no real downloads, absolutely transparent to users. Essentially web apps and desktop apps are the same in the sense that they both depend on APIs. Web apps depend on remote APIs and desktop apps depend on local/native APIs. The more local dependency you can remove, the more powerful the apps can be. Therefore, web apps are much more powerful than desktop apps and desktop apps making uses of public APIs such as Twitter APIs, Facebook APIs are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.