Goodbye, Desktop Apps

Modern web applications are replacing your favorite desktop apps.

Shalitha Suranga
Level Up Coding
Published in
5 min readApr 20, 2021

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Photo by alleksana from Pexels

Earlier, the internet only had websites that consisted of read-only information, known as the Web 1.0 era. Later, with the uprising Web 2.0 era, the modern web applications concept was introduced. Nowadays, we have very user-friendly and highly dynamic web applications. A computer has no value if there is no operating system. If there is an operating system installed, we can install applications to do our day-to-day works. There are three types of applications: Desktop applications, mobile applications, and web applications. Mobile and desktop applications run on top of the operating system. On the other hand, web applications work inside the web browser — which is a desktop application.

Now, web browser APIs give enough access to the required hardware components as well. For example, access to the camera, speakers, and microphone. On the other hand, the cost of internet usage is becoming cheaper, creating a large web audience. Therefore, developers tend to implement more applications for web browsers instead of making applications for operating systems. If we are developing a desktop application, we have to make it for all existing platforms to reach all the users. But, if our application is a web application, it literally becomes a cross-platform application because web browsers usually available on all platforms.

This situation created a competition between desktop applications and web applications. Nowadays, a typical computer user spends more time on the web browser because there are web application alternatives for almost all desktop applications. For example, we can create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, videos, and literally anything with web applications. These web applications are performing better than desktop applications with features like online collaboration. Cloud computing resources are being used over the user’s hardware in many scenarios of web applications.

Hardware independent apps

Photo by Taylor Vick on Unsplash

Earlier, we had desktop applications to convert media file formats. The file…

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