inessential by Brent Simmons

Desktop Means Web

I’ve learned something that I suspect is true across much of our industry: the list of platforms in the world is iOS, Android, and desktop.

And — this is critical — desktop literally means web. (It could mean something like Electron wrapping a website, but that’s pretty much the same thing.)

I thought the list of platforms looked like this:

  • Web
  • Desktop (native Mac, Windows, Linux)
  • iOS
  • Android

But it looks like this:

  • Desktop (web)
  • iOS
  • Android

…and, really, in many places, it looks like this:

  • Desktop (web)
  • Mobile (some WORA thing that gets you iOS and Android apps)

(Yes, for some places, TV is also a platform. The various voice-based devices are platforms too. There may also be a mobile web thing. But these are side notes compared to desktop and mobile.)

* * *

I’ve also seen the word surface used often, and it’s not the same thing as a platform. iOS and Android are separate surfaces — and Safari on a Mac is a separate surface from, say, Chrome on Windows, even though both are desktop app surfaces. I think surface means a runtime/device combination.

* * *

There are some interesting, at least to me, implications of the above.

One is that there is no word that means what desktop used to mean — there’s no word for “native Mac, Windows, and Linux apps.” It’s not a concept anymore.

Another is that the web sort of lost as a software platform on mobile. The web is for Windows, Mac, and Linux machines — it’s the old way of things. For mobile, it’s all about the apps. But maybe the web didn’t totally lose here, because often those apps are cross-platform affairs that run on web technologies.

PS One thing to take away: if you’re writing or talking about desktop apps, and you mean native Mac, Windows, and Linux apps, then your audience may not understand you — because they think you mean web apps.