Web Apps' Death by a Thousand Cuts

I love web apps. Hardly anything inspires me to write a detailed review like an exciting new web app. I got started writing online back when I only had a Windows PC, and web apps were the most exciting thing there with the all-but-inexistent indie app market on PCs. So I found the best of them, curated them at the now-defunct GreatWebApps blog, then got my first editorial job at Web.AppStorm.

And yet, I'm a hypocrite. I use plenty of web apps — mainly as services to feed into native apps. When I'm writing, my words might be synced in iCloud or Dropbox, but they're usually written in a native app. Same for almost everything else. I use web apps to publish my site, track stats, collaborate with team members, and everything else that obviously has to be networked. Everything else might be synced with the cloud, but I reach for native apps for work and fun whenever I possibly can. And I suspect the same is the case for almost most others.

Foster at Mysterous Trousers just wrote a detailed article about the numerous little things that stack up to make us conditioned to not rely on web apps for our normal work. They make a very good point:

"Someone could build the most amazing web app ever and they’d be battling our history with hundreds of other web apps that have let us down."

Go read the full article for all the reasons they came up with for why people are scared of relying on web apps, which are all too true. It puts in words what I've been thinking about web apps — even those I love — for quite some time.

Continue reading at http://mysterioustrousers.com/news/2013/5/6/tiny-little-knives

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.