DEV Community

Discussion on: Which computer era would have been the most exciting to take part in?

Collapse
 
yaser profile image
Yaser Al-Najjar

Most apps now are either web or mobile.

If you wanna make a living from developing desktop apps, you can only do so by joining big companies that dominated the market long ago like Adobe, AutoDesk... etc.

Thread Thread
 
docx profile image
Lukáš Doležal

operating systems, developer tools, web browsers... are still also desktop apps :D

Thread Thread
 
yaser profile image
Yaser Al-Najjar

Be honest with yourself and think: can you make money on those?

Most dev tools are free.

OSs and desktop apps who make money are owned by the big companies that I mentioned before.

As an indie developer, it's just much harder to make money building desktop apps these days.

Thread Thread
 
docx profile image
Lukáš Doležal

Oh 100%. I did not think about making money on those.

Thread Thread
 
docx profile image
Lukáš Doležal

Tho. There is still room for innovative desktop software. For example I can imagine software development tools (that add some value on top of just being cool text editor), will be huge thing in couple of years. They are right now commercial IDEs but they don't do much more. When AI gets in, it will be huge deal. But yes, not easy.

Anything where you need low latency and high (but not supercomputer-like) performance and/or work offline is still good for desktop. Tho it may also change (even tho, it will most likely be desktop apps streaming, like we can see with games already).