- Cross platform UI is hard. (I'm learning to use Avalonia, and that's getting better but for now it feels pretty hard to get into, especially for someone coming from outside the XAML/dotnet ecosystem)
- Downloading an app presents significant friction to users. If you can solve it with a web app, you'll get a much wider reach (though converting that to paying customers might be a challenge)
- Platforms are making it HARD (signing, lots of "run this app from an unsafe source? open anyways?") It's doable if you already have a large, established app but just throwing together little utility apps is much harder than it used to be.
- Cloud Data. Users expect their projects and data to be available on the cloud. Platforms offer good ways to do this (like CloudKit) but there's no cross platform way to do this. Also this means that you're going to have to deal with auth/login at some level, which is a pain.
- No marketplace. If you build a standalone app, with no subscription nonsense, where are you going to sell it? Build your own store page and payment processor?
- The elves have left for the undying lands. The golden days where an app could exist as a standalone thing is just over. Our world is so interconnected that apps need to be connected to lots of other things -- even standalone apps end up talking to a bunch of apis. This interconnectedness is significantly easier in a browser or server-based app, even though it's quite possible in a desktop app.
- Cross platform UI is hard. (I'm learning to use Avalonia, and that's getting better but for now it feels pretty hard to get into, especially for someone coming from outside the XAML/dotnet ecosystem)
- Downloading an app presents significant friction to users. If you can solve it with a web app, you'll get a much wider reach (though converting that to paying customers might be a challenge)
- Platforms are making it HARD (signing, lots of "run this app from an unsafe source? open anyways?") It's doable if you already have a large, established app but just throwing together little utility apps is much harder than it used to be.
- Cloud Data. Users expect their projects and data to be available on the cloud. Platforms offer good ways to do this (like CloudKit) but there's no cross platform way to do this. Also this means that you're going to have to deal with auth/login at some level, which is a pain.
- No marketplace. If you build a standalone app, with no subscription nonsense, where are you going to sell it? Build your own store page and payment processor?
- The elves have left for the undying lands. The golden days where an app could exist as a standalone thing is just over. Our world is so interconnected that apps need to be connected to lots of other things -- even standalone apps end up talking to a bunch of apis. This interconnectedness is significantly easier in a browser or server-based app, even though it's quite possible in a desktop app.