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Discussion on: Will desktop #PWAs kill hybrid wrappers like electronjs?

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nektro profile image
Meghan (she/her)

On your first point, that flag isn't required to add apps to your desktop. If you click the three-dots menu in the top right, under "More tools", there should be an option that says "Add to desktop..."

Second, I don't think web apps will entirely replace "native" applications, but I don't see any reason why these apps couldn't be made with tech very similar to JS, HTML, etc. On the other hand, I definitely do not think that web apps should ever get free roam access to a user's filesystem. I don't think native apps should even have free access to the filesystem but you can't fix the past, only build a better future.

For instance, it wouldn't make sense for a web site to have an API to host a web server. But a server and no-CORS networking is definitely an API some apps would want and make total sense in some cases. Something similar to ChromeOS is definitely the future, but it was ahead of its time because Google is really bad at advertising its own technology. The future I see is 99% of apps are web sites, and the small rest of apps use some standard for accessing native APIs (think POSIX 2042).