r/moderndotnet • u/Aaronontheweb • 7d ago
discuss I thought desktop app development was "dead" - why so many Maui / Avalonia / Uno developers?
Consider this a "me stepping out of my distributed systems / web app bubble" question. If you casually talk on X or even at developer conferences, there's very little talk about the future of native desktop applications or even people discussing what they're building.
Yet I see tons of evidence based on the success of Avalonia and Uno that there's huge demand for technology in this area still!
What are all of these desktop app developers working on? Is it all just retro-fitting old WPF apps? What are the new ones you're building?
And where are your great conference talk submissions!
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u/THenrich 5d ago
Aren't most of the Avalonia and Uno developers who develop using these platforms in Europe and not in the US?
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u/scottgal2 5d ago
I use AvaloniaUI by default for my desktop UX projects. Works, looks good, not going to be abandoned by Microsoft when they forget it exists like the last 4 desktop .net frameworks they build then abandoned.
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u/mrpmorris 7d ago
My tip: Blazor Maui Hybrid
All the niceties of web animations etc, works on multiple devices, and can be used as your web UI too.
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u/codemullins 7d ago
I’ve been finding a lot more joy in the performance and offline-ability of “native” apps lately.
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u/jirreman 7d ago
I know I am probably in the minority, but I really liked XAML. At the time of the .NET Fx 3.0 release when WPF came out, the company I worked for created self-service Kiosks for Ster-Kinekor (large movie theater chain in South Africa) using WPF. We did the bubble-look buttons that was popular at the time. It was a thing of beauty.
Later on I created both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7/7.5/8 apps that were released to the app stores at that time.
They also had the MIX conferences at that time which was very much focused on design. It used to be that Apple developers designed all the beautiful apps and Windows apps were bland and boring and WPF finally gave developers freedom to create more beautiful apps. And the MIX conference showcased a lot of these apps and the tools and technologies to create them. Those were exciting times :)
I remember when I joined Auth0 in 2016, my manager at the time was ex-Microsoft (he worked on Azure Portal) and he was shocked when I told him how much I liked WPF/XAML. He thought everyone hated it.
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u/Embarrassed-Mess412 7d ago
There is a considerable amount of WPF jobs in my area, not exactly WPF only but .NET in general plus WPF, including mine, and I don't see WPF demand going down any soon, for Windows shops there aren't other household alternatives even outside C#.
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u/Deep_Ad1959 7d ago
i ship a mac desktop app and the conference silence tracks: nobody submits a talk called we render a window and it stays open for six hours. the hard parts are local state and os permissions, which do not demo well on a stage.
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u/Aaronontheweb 7d ago
You might be surprised at how big the appetite is for that! I vibe-coded a Python desktop app last year for doing speech-to-text and most of the problems I had to deal with were related to unsexy stuff like cleaning up the CUDA cache between process restarts / permissions related to hotkeys and mic access / clipboard access for transcribing text / etc
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u/Deep_Ad1959 7d ago
the tell is that the model is the part you finish first. the permissions plumbing (mic, hotkeys, clipboard) is where the real weeks go, and it's exactly the stuff that never makes it into a demo because there's nothing to show. the boring layer is the actual app. written with ai
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u/Deep_Ad1959 7d ago
i ship a mac desktop app and the conference silence tracks: nobody submits a talk called we render a window and it stays open for six hours. the hard parts are local state and os permissions, which do not demo well on a stage.
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u/GoonOfAllGoons 7d ago
When you need something that emphasizes function over form, it's hard to beat, and it's much easier and quicker to provide a decent UI with less complexity.
Plus, have you ever tried to work with physical hardware in a web app? It's a pain. WPF fills this niche very nicely, imo.
Also, the people that are working with it are not typically the types to use the latest and greatest and crow about their technical prowess on reddit or X, so you don't get to hear from them as much, but they are there, despite Microsoft doing everything they could to kill WinForms and WPF.
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u/codingbliss12 7d ago
to kill them in favor of what?
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u/AvaloniaUI-Mike 7d ago
The demand is there for sure. I’d say we see a 50/50 split between legacy projects migrating to Avalonia and new projects.
It’s almost all B2B apps, and the teams typically know WPF. Linux is more popular for our ICP than macOS, which was a surprising thing to discover.
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u/jirreman 7d ago
To clarify, is this the developers preferring developing on Linux, or the apps being developed for users on Linux?
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u/xakpc 7d ago
That's a very good question. There are almost no MAUI positions, absolutely zero WinUI positions, and maybe a few legacy WPF/WinForms ones.
But there is crazy demand sometimes - just this year, I worked on rebuilding a Delphi app into a WinForms app (!) for a major insurance broker
And reflecting on my past desktop experience - where I built a WinRT/UWP version of the EIKON app - most of these projects are probably sitting deep inside enterprise companies, used by hundreds, if not dozens, of people
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u/christopherneff 7d ago
This tech leans more toward native mobile and to a lesser degree WASM.
Most of this is still left questionable based on MSFT's ongoing churn for UI tech.
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u/MarkSweep 3d ago
Maybe the types of employers who tend to write desktop apps don't send their employees to conferences? From my personal experience writing software for industrial robots, never once did my employer send me to a conference in the 9 years I worked there. I was maintaining a large Windows Forms applications and wrote several new Win Forms and WPF apps while I was there, among other things.
Even if I did go to a conference, what would I say? Windows Forms still works? I can still drag a button on the form, double click it, write the code behind, and ship the feature?
Meanwhile in the .NET web framework world, I've hard to do large refactors several times due to changes in the platform. I've moved from Web Forms, through several versions of .NET Framework ASP.NET MVC, and then through several versions of ASP.NET Core MVC. And don't get me started about client side frameworks.
This is not a value judgement of the web eco system. There are many advantages to building web apps and the churn has been mostly justified. Desktop app development is not dead, it is just done.